Author of the piece here :-). We are not building coding agents and focused on quite different stuff… I am just trying to share my personal experience as a software person!
The experience of long-term software engineers (e.g. antirez) who don’t have a horse in the AI race tends to line up much better with my own.
Also really like this one: https://diwank.space/field-notes-from-shipping-real-code-wit...
If you believe that agents will replace software developers like me in the near term, then you’d think I have a horse in this race.
But I don’t believe that.
My company pays for Cursor and so do I, and I’m using it with all the latest models. For my main job, writing code in a vast codebase with internal frameworks everywhere, it’s reasonably useless.
For much smaller codebases it’s much better, and it’s excellent for greenfield work.
But greenfield work isn’t where most of the money and time is spent.
There’s an assumption the tools will get much better. There are several ways they could be better (e.g. plugging into typecheckers to enable global reasoning about a codebase) but even then they’re not in replacement territory.
I listen to people like Yann LeCun and Demis Hassabis who believe further as-yet-unknown innovations are needed before we can escape a local maxima that we have with LLMs.
My experience matches theirs - Claude Code is absolutely phenomenal, as is the Cursor tab completion model and the new memory feature.
Charlie Marsh seems to have much better luck writing Rust with Claude than I have. Claude has been great for TypeScript changes and build scripts but lousy when it comes to stuff like Rust borrowing
I'll add - they do seem to do better with Go and Typescript (particularly Next and React) and are somewhat good with Python (although you need a clean project structure with nothing magic in it).
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