Many of us got hit by the agent coding addiction. It feels good, we barely sleep, we build amazing things. Every once in a while that interaction involves other humans, and all of a sudden we get a reality check that maybe we overdid it.
In His Dark Materials, every human has a dæmon, a companion that is an externally visible manifestation of their soul. It lives alongside as an animal, but it talks, thinks and acts independently. I’m starting to relate our relationship with agents that have memory to those little creatures. We become dependent on them, and separation from them is painful and takes away from our new-found identity. We’re relying on these little companions to validate us and to collaborate with. But it’s not a genuine collaboration like between humans, it’s one that is completely driven by us, and the AI is just there for the ride. We can trick it to reinforce our ideas and impulses. And we act through this AI. Some people who have not programmed before, now wield tremendous powers, but all those powers are gone when their subscription hits a rate limit and their little dæmon goes to sleep.
Looking at Gas Town (and Beads) from the outside, it looks like a Mad Max cult. What are polecats, refineries, mayors, beads, convoys doing in an agentic coding system? If the maintainer is in the loop, and the whole community is in on this mad ride, then everyone and their dæmons just throw more slop up. As an external observer the whole project looks like an insane psychosis or a complete mad art project. Except, it’s real? Or is it not? Apparently a reason for slowdown in Gas Town is contention on figuring out the version of Beads, which takes 7 subprocess spawns. Or using the doctor command times out completely. Beads keeps growing and growing in complexity and people who are using it, are realizing that it’s almost impossible to uninstall.
So where is all this code? Where are all the great tools everyone is building? So far all I’ve seen are some bad web games, parody projects and mentions of mysterious tools for personal use. If it’s so easy to code now why we don’t see explosion of projects everyone needs? Just use AI to make Servo based browser, make PostmarketOS run flawlessly on modern phones and give me open source apps for all the shit IoT products sold everywhere.
It’s a rhetorical question. We all know why we don’t see it.
I’m working on a app now and I’m spending half of my time on thinking about the UI/UX, trying different options, selecting/designing icons, perfecting minor details in user flow. Other half is mostly trying to make the code clean and maintainable and learning new tools. AI agent would probably make a prototype in a couple of hours and then I could dump it on github and forget about it.
That being said I would like to use AI for couple of project I had in mind for a long time. Translate some github actions into gitlab CI/CD so I can migrate my projects, translate some JavaScript APIs into Rust (WebAssembly). It’s boring work and AI should be able to handle it. It would be nice if some of the vibe coders did things like that but my guess is they don’t really touch real projects people use (or don’t understand them enough to contribute anything useful, just flood them with shit quality PRs), just generate bunch of slop that no one cares about.