#devtools
6 articles
When Code Becomes Cheap, Evidence Becomes the Engineering Product
Coding agents can produce changes faster than teams can responsibly absorb them. The scarce skill is shifting from writing implementations to creating evidence that a change belongs in the system.
Coding Agents Need a Constitution of Permissions
Giving an agent more repository access can improve its completion rate while making the surrounding organization less safe. The answer is a legible permission system built around consequences, not another layer of prompt advice.
Open-Weight Models Just Became a Procurement Decision, Not a Research One
Running your own model used to be a research project with an uncertain payoff. With serious open-weight releases now clustering close to proprietary frontier performance on many tasks, the conversation inside regulated companies has shifted from "can we" to "should we," and that is a very different, much faster conversation.
The Terminal Is Quietly Becoming the Best AI Product Surface
Chat windows were the first home for AI assistants and IDE sidebars were the second. The place coding agents are actually earning their keep now is older than both: the command line, where an agent can read a whole repository, run tests, and show its work in a format engineers already trust.
The Model Context Protocol Is Turning Into AI's USB-C Moment
For two years every AI agent needed a bespoke integration to touch your files, your database, or your ticketing system. MCP is quietly ending that, and the fact that it comes from a model vendor rather than a standards body is exactly why it is working.
Give Coding Agents a Budget of Authority, Not a Longer Prompt
The safest useful coding agent is not the one with the most elaborate instructions. It is the one whose permissions, evidence requirements and rollback paths make good behavior easier than improvisation.