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Erik Craddock
Erik Craddock@eriklink

The Center Has a Bias

What matters here is a narrower point. The center is not biased towards novelty so much as towards contact with the thing that creates potential change. The middle ground is not between use and non-use, but between refusal and commitment and the people in the center will often look more like adopters than skeptics, not because they have already made up their minds, but because getting an informed view requires exploration.

The Center Has a Bias

Armin Ronacher

The Center Has a Bias

Why a measured position on AI tends to lean towards actually trying it.

linkby Armin Ronachervia Armin Ronacher
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Erik Craddock
Erik Craddock@eriklink

The Final Bottleneck

Because it is not the final bottleneck. We will find ways to take responsibility for what we ship, because society will demand it. Non-sentient machines will never be able to carry responsibility, and it looks like we will need to deal with this problem before machines achieve this status. Regardless of how bizarre they appear to act already.

I too am the bottleneck now. But you know what? Two years ago, I too was the bottleneck. I was the bottleneck all along. The machine did not really change that. And for as long as I carry responsibilities and am accountable, this will remain true. If we manage to push accountability upwards, it might change, but so far, how that would happen is not clear.

The Final Bottleneck

Armin Ronacher

The Final Bottleneck

AI speeds up writing code, but accountability and review capacity still impose hard limits.

linkby Armin Ronachervia Armin Ronacher
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Erik Craddock
Erik Craddock@eriklink

A Language For Agents

The biggest reason new languages might work is that the cost of coding is going down dramatically. The result is the breadth of an ecosystem matters less. I'm now routinely reaching for JavaScript in places where I would have used Python. Not because I love it or the ecosystem is better, but because the agent does much better with TypeScript.

A Language For Agents

Armin Ronacher

A Language For Agents

What programming languages would agents want to program in?

linkby Armin Ronachervia Armin Ronacher
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Erik Craddock
Erik Craddock@eriklink

Pi: The Minimal Agent Within OpenClaw

Pi is written by Mario Zechner and unlike Peter, who aims for "sci-fi with a touch of madness," Mario is very grounded. Despite the differences in approach, both OpenClaw and Pi follow the same idea: LLMs are really good at writing and running code, so embrace this.

Pi: The Minimal Agent Within OpenClaw

Armin Ronacher

Pi: The Minimal Agent Within OpenClaw

A gentle introduction to the Pi coding agent and why I think it’s a glimpse into the future of software.

linkby Armin Ronachervia Armin Ronacher
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Erik Craddock
Erik Craddock@eriklink

90% | Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings

Is 90% of code going to be written by AI? I don’t know. What I do know is, that for me, on this project, the answer is already yes. I’m part of that growing subset of developers who are building real systems this way.

That said, none of this removes the need to actually be a good engineer. If you let the AI take over without judgment, you’ll end up with brittle systems and painful surprises (data loss, security holes, unscalable software). The tools are powerful, but they don’t absolve you of responsibility.

90%

Armin Ronacher

90%

AI is writing 90% of the code I was in charge of

linkby Armin Ronachervia Armin Ronacher
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Erik Craddock
Erik Craddock@eriklink

In Support Of Shitty Types | Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings

As a shining example of types adding a lot of value we have Go. Go’s types are much less expressive and very structural. Things conform to interfaces purely by having certain methods. The LLM does not need to understand much to comprehend that. Also, the types that Go has are rather strictly enforced. If they are wrong, it won’t compile. Because Go has a much simpler type system that doesn’t support complicated constructs, it works much better—both for LLMs to understand the code they produce and for the LLM to understand real-world libraries you might give to an LLM.

In Support Of Shitty Types

Armin Ronacher

In Support Of Shitty Types

A curious thing about types and agents

linkby Armin Ronachervia Armin Ronacher
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Erik Craddock
Erik Craddock@eriklink

We Can Just Measure Things | Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings

When an agent struggles, so does a human. There is a lot of code and tooling out there which is objectively not good, but because of one reason or another became dominant. If you want to start paying attention to technology choices or you want to start writing your own libraries, now you can use agents to evaluate the developer experience.Because so can your users. I can confidently say it's not just me that does not like Xcode, my agent also expresses frustration — measurably so.

We Can Just Measure Things

Armin Ronacher

We Can Just Measure Things

Using programming agents to measure measuring developer productivity.

linkby Armin Ronachervia Armin Ronacher
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Erik Craddock
Erik Craddock@eriklink

Agentic Coding Recommendations

My general workflow involves assigning a job to an agent (which effectively has full permissions) and then waiting for it to complete the task. I rarely interrupt it, unless it's a small task. Consequently, the role of the IDE — and the role of AI in the IDE — is greatly diminished; I mostly use it for final edits. This approach has even revived my usage of Vim, which lacks AI integration.

Agentic Coding Recommendations

Armin Ronacher

Agentic Coding Recommendations

Current recommendations of agentic coding.

linkby Armin Ronachervia Armin Ronacher
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