DeepSWE

Note on 24th September 2026

The more time I spend working with coding agents, the more convinced I am that they make software engineering even harder. We can do amazing things with them, but unlocking …

Cognition | Agent Trace: Capturing the Context Graph of Code

We’re excited to join in Cursor, Cloudflare, Vercel, git-ai, OpenCode and others in support of [Agent Trace](https://agent-trace.dev/). As described in the spec, Agent Trace is an open, vendor-neutral spec for recording AI contributions alongside human authorship in version-controlled codebases.

Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It

In the era of A.I. agents, many Silicon Valley programmers are now barely programming. Instead, what they’re doing is deeply, deeply weird.

Does Code Cleanliness Affect Coding Agents? A Controlled Minimal-Pair Study

As autonomous coding agents see rapid adoption, their evaluation has primarily focused on task completion rates holding the target codebase fixed. This leaves a critical question unanswered: does the structural and stylistic quality, or ``cleanliness'' of the underlying code affect an agent's ability to navigate and modify it? To isolate the effect of code cleanliness from agent capability, we introduce an evaluation protocol built around minimal pairs: repositories that match on architecture, dependencies, and external behaviour, but differ on static-analysis rule violations and cognitive complexity. The pairs are constructed in both directions, by agent pipelines that either degrade a clean repository or clean a messy one. We author 33 tasks across six such pairs, evaluated through hidden tests at the application's public surface. Across 660 trials with Claude Code, code cleanliness does not change the agent's pass rate. However, it substantially alters the agent's operational footprint: agents working on cleaner code use 7 to 8% fewer tokens and reduce file revisitations by 34%. Our findings suggest that traditional maintainability principles remain highly relevant in the era of AI-driven development, shaping the computational cost and navigational efficiency of coding agents. Code cleanliness joins model choice, harness, and prompting as a factor that materially affects agent behaviours.

AI Tools Accelerates Coding, but Not Overall Software Delivery, GitLab Research Finds

GitLab's 2026 AI Accountability Report highlights an AI Paradox: although 78% of developers say they code faster, overall software delivery has not accelerated due to downstream testing and review bottlenecks and new challenges for enterprise governance and traceability.

Write-Only Code | Heavybit

AI may be accelerating software into a world of "write-only" code that forces a rethink of culture, processes, and tools. Heavybit’s Joseph Ruscio explains.

Harness engineering: leveraging Codex in an agent-first world

By Ryan Lopopolo, Member of the Technical Staff

The Picture They Paint of You

Musings on the way we frame Coding Assistants, AI SREs, and what this communicates in terms of how these roles are perceived.

Writing code is cheap now - Agentic Engineering Patterns - Simon Willison's Weblog

The biggest challenge in adopting agentic engineering practices is getting comfortable with the consequences of the fact that writing code is cheap now.

The Coding Agent Data Deal

On user data control, coding agents as retrievers, and the value of your coding transcripts

The 80% Problem in Agentic Coding

Managing comprehension debt when leaning on AI to code

No Coding Before 10am | Michael Bloch

Engineering is no longer about writing code. Here is one startup's playbook for building in the AI agent era.

Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t

Coding agents as normal technology

The Future of Software Engineering Isn’t What You Think

Over the past two decades, I’ve watched software eat the world, then hardware catch up, then Generative AI reshape both at the same time…

Where is all the new, good software?

Here's a question we see, especially from AI skeptics: if AI coding is so great, shouldn't we be seeing more new, good software by now? Here are some answ...

DeepMind Institute

Bold, well-evidenced thinking on AGI from the lab that pioneered the field. Read the latest essays from the DeepMind Institute.