The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Coding agents have crossed a chasm (News)

Episode Date: June 30, 2025

David Singleton says coding agents have crossed a chasm, Anton Zaides explains how SWEs should approach the "squeeze", Mat Duggan has ideas for Kubernetes 2.0, Sean Goedecke does a nice job elucidating the coding agent commoditization, and one more good reason to write, even though it's hard.

What's up nerds? I'm Jared and this is ChangeLog News for the week of Monday, June 30th, 2025. Michael Rogers, longtime ChangeLog friend and contributor, passed away this month from colon cancer. He was relentless in his support of us and our work. JS Party would have never existed without Michael. Neither would RFC. I'm so thankful that our lives intersected if only for a brief while.

Michael died at 42 years young. My exact age today. Count your blessings, y'all. We aren't guaranteed tomorrow. You should read his full obituary. Link in the newsletter. OK, let's get into the news. Coding agents have crossed a chasm.

My recent experience aligns with David Singleton's, who says quote, Somewhere in the last few months, something fundamental shifted for me with autonomous AI coding agents. They've gone from a, hey, this is pretty neat, curiosity, to something I genuinely can't imagine working without. Not in a hand wavy, hype cycle-y way, but in a very concrete, this is changing how I ship software, way.

End quote. I explained to Adam on Friends episode 98 that Claude code feels like it's delivering on the promises that the AI hypesters have been making ever since Chat GPT broke the internet back in November of 22. I'm letting it code up many scripts and tools that didn't cross my personal ROI threshold previously.

And David says the same, quote, "'For personal tools, I've completely shifted my approach. "'I don't even look at the code anymore. "'I describe what I want to clog code, test the result, make some minor tweaks with the AI, and if it's not good enough, I start over with a slightly different initial prompt. The software engineering squeeze.

Software engineers have had it easy for many years, but the times certainly are a-changing. Anton Zaitis is optimistic. Quote, all those companies started by vibe coders all around you, many will succeed but the times certainly are a-changin'. Anton Zaitis is optimistic, quote, all those companies started by vibe coders all around you, many will succeed and will need great engineers to scale up. Some engineers understand this and use the chance to skill up.

To succeed, you'll probably need all the skills of an engineer, some of a PM, and even a bit of design taste. It's not just about shipping code anymore. But if you work as a code monkey, getting detailed tickets and just shipping them, you've done this to yourself. You won't be needed pretty soon." End quote.

Say it with me, for the umpteenth time, we have to move up the value chain, just keep moving on up to avoid the squeeze. What would a Kubernetes 2.0 look like? Matt Duggan has been working with Kubernetes for 10 plus years and has a lot of good things to say about it, but the journey hasn't been without problems. Quote, some common trends have emerged where mistakes

or misconfiguration arise from where Kubernetes is not opinionated enough. Even 10 years on, we're still seeing a lot of churn inside of ecosystem and people stepping on well documented landmines." So, knowing what he knows now, Matt asks and answers the question, what could we do differently to make this great tool even more applicable

to more people and problems? Here's the top level of his thoughts. One, ditch YAML for HCL. Two, allow etcd swap out. 3. A native package manager. And 4. IPv6 by default.

Click through for the skinny on each improvement. I'll clip one last thought for Matt because it's a crucial point even if you aren't a Kubernetes person. Defaults are the most powerful force in technology. Coding agents are already commoditized. Sean Gadecki does a nice job elucidating another thought I've had while talking to various devs about coding agents and seeing so many orgs shipping their own lately. These things have no moat.

It turns out that putting the model in a loop with a read file and write file tool is good enough to do basically anything you want. I don't know for sure that the closed source options operate like this, but it's an educated guess. In other words, the agent hackers in 2023 were correct and the only reason they couldn't build cloud code then was that they were too early to get to use the really good models. End quote. Sean says it's a tough market right now to sell a better AI coding agent in Because open source solutions like OpenAI's codecs are already very good, but that's not even the point. The reason OpenAI wants you using codecs

and Anthropic wants you using Claude code and Google wants you using Gemini CLI and Sourcegraph wants you using AMP is not to sell you a better coding agent, it's to sell you their tokens instead of you buying somebody else's tokens. The challenge with that strategy is that it has a very small moat. Not no moat, mind you, but not much of one either. Write to escape your default setting.

Writing is hard. Painful even. In the past, I've likened publishing an essay to birthing a child. They're both laborious journeys mired in contractions, heavy breathing, and occasional screams. My wife, who birthed six healthy children on our behalf, finds that analogy lacking. She deserves to. I'd come up with a better one.

But writing is hard. I guess my point is, sometimes we need motivation to do hard things. If you need some reasons to write, this one's for you. Quote, at its best, writing can expose the ugly, uncomfortable, or unrealistic parts of your thoughts. It can pluck out parasitic ideas burrowed so deeply that they imperceptibly steer your feelings and beliefs. Sometimes this uprooting will reveal that the lustrous potential of a new idea is a mirage

or that your understanding of someone's motive was incomplete, maybe your own projected BS reflected back to you. That is the news for now, but go and subscribe to the ChangeLog newsletter for the full scoop of links worth clicking on, such as… Open Source has turned into two worlds. Get quick statistics. And a clawed Code usage monitor.

Get in on the newsletter at changelog.news. Alright, have a great week, like, subscribe, and 5 star review us if you liked the show, and I'll talk to you again real soon.