state of agentic coding #11: the curiosity test, lisp, and labs that can't fail

people are failing a curiosity test right now. Armin Ronacher and Ben Vinegar had me on State of Agentic Coding to talk about it, along with DHH coming around, durable agents, a Lisp you program by talking to it, and why the labs cannot afford to fail. Ben Vinegar (co-founder of Modem) and Armin Ronacher (Earendil, and the person most people know from Pi) run a podcast called State of Agentic Coding, and I was the guest for episode 11. Ben and I were in the same room in Toronto. I'd landed the day before after 22 hours of flying, I was there for two days, and then I was flying back to Sydney. Armin stayed in Vienna, sensibly. We covered a lot of ground in an hour and a half. Here's the gist, written up properly, with chapter links at the bottom if you want to jump to a specific part of the conversation. DHH did the funeral last week and he's right. the curiosity test Ben opened by asking what my contribution to the GDP of AI development has been from Ralph loops. The OpenRouter folks personally came up to me to say thanks for the uptick, so I know it has burned a lot of tokens. I published the research in July last year. When I first showed it to Cursor they thought it was garbage. Nine months later they'd implemented it, then Anthropic did it, then OpenAI did it, and now everyone's talking about loop engineering. Dex calculated it at about $10.42 an hour when you run it in the loop and it builds AFK overnight. That weighed a lot on my shoulders when it first came out. Ralph Wiggum as a "software engineer" How Ralph Wiggum went from 'The Simpsons' to the biggest name in AI right now - Venture Beat 😎Here's a cool little field report from a Y Combinator hackathon event where they put Ralph Wiggum to the test. "We Put a Coding Agent in a While Loop and It Shipped I've spent this year traveling the world giving talks, pleading with people to invest in themselves. My shortest take is this: software developers are failing a curiosity test. If you're displaced by AI as a software developer, it's self-inflicted, because you haven't been curious in a time of rapid transformation. As an employee, you trade time and skill for money. Employers' tastes are changing rapidly, but there's no reason you can't keep up with what's going on. Just harshing everybody's vibe right out of the gate. Ben pushed back here, and fairly. When people come into the industry they're young and have infinite time on their hands. Now many of them are in their thirties or forties and have racked up responsibilities. It's the same reason video games get harder to stay into as you age. It's hard to retool at this rate of change, and it's hard to feel optimistic when the thing at the centre of your income and your self-worth is in flux. I concur. Dex Horthy has described my writing over the last two years as the depression era of Geoff: mourning the profession while pleading with people to be curious and to put themselves and their family unit first. This change has been forced on the world non-consensually. It displaces your identity. Are you a .NET developer? A Golang developer? A Python developer? It doesn't matter anymore. What matters is how good a developer you are, and whether you're using the thing employers now expect as the bare minimum. Armin made a sharp observation: a lot of people in AI talk a very confident game externally, and that probably applies to us too. I'm straight up about this. I don't bloody know. Every time I discover something new, it strips me raw. You discover a new technique or capability, you thought you had a mental model of how it would play out, and then the game changes. boom and bust Ben, playing tour guide, pointed out that the closest US cities to Toronto are Buffalo and Detroit. Buffalo was once the third most populous city in the US, prosperous because of its rail access to the Great Lakes. It's now one of the most rapidly declining. Detroit is a later, similar story, tied to the auto industry. His point: there's a long history of people with hubris believing the good times will never end. I've been through a few of these cycles, going back to the original dot-com boom and bust. Senior compensation went through the roof during the ZIRP era because, in the previous bust, we didn't develop enough talent. That created a scarcity of knowledge. Hold on, folks: the same cycle will repeat. CS enrolments are down; I remember seeing something like 22% in Singapore this year. Dear Student: Yes, AI is here, you're screwed unless you take action... Two weeks ago a student anonymously emailed me asking for advice. This is the reply and if I was in your shoes this is what I'd do. So, I read your blog post "An oh f*** moment in time" alongside "The future belongs to idea guys that can just If you really love computers, you should be all in on loving computers right now. Everyone's having the time of their damn life. If you've stayed curious and kept your skills up to date, you can get placed anywhere right now. That means being able to stand at a whiteboard and explain how to build a coding agent as a sequence diagram, how inferencing works, and what a prompt cache is. Armin had a slightly different read. Detroit not growing doesn't mean cars stopped being a thing; the industry went worldwide and commoditized. Software engineers got paid really well because we were scarce and our only competition was other software engineers. Automation didn't play a role. That's changing. He's absolutely convinced the exceptional role our profession has had over the last twenty years won't return in the same form. There will probably be a period with more demand for software engineers, but it will commoditize quickly. He's also curious what happens to San Francisco, a city that hasn't grown its housing stock, when the Anthropic IPO mints a pile of multi-millionaires competing for it. I'm hoping for another PayPal-mafia-type thing. When people get minted, they invest in what they know. dhh did the funeral If you're in love with typing on a keyboard in an IDE, I'm sorry to say it, but DHH did the funeral last week, and he's right. You can still type code; you just do it in your personal workshop. Employers now want you to use the CNC machine and be very good with the CNC machine. They don't want artisanal woodworking anymore. Ben summarised the Rails World keynote nicely. DHH walked through three generations of family pictures: a single drawing from his grandfather, a handful of photos from his childhood, and his kids with every second of their lives photographed. Portrait painting was an economic outcome. When photography made drawing reality uneconomic, painting went to impressionism and cubism: let's draw what isn't reality. Armin had been on a panel at a Ruby conference in Austria earlier this year with Chad Fowler, who already said that the agent never writes Ruby for him anymore. When you sample which languages agents actually use, Ruby doesn't show up meaningfully. The online reaction to the keynote was largely dismissive, but the in-person reaction was much better received. Armin's point is that communities are disintegrating and reforming around the ideas that brought them together in the first place, even as the technology underneath changes. The Rails community is really a descendant of how DHH thinks software should be built; Ruby was just the tool. So what's the point of a programming language or framework full of sugar designed for humans if humans aren't writing the code anymore? I've been chatting with the creator of Elixir, and he gets it. Language designers have dumbed down their languages to make them easy to learn for the human operator. All of that is falsified now that the agent writes the code. What does an agent need? What's the point of LSPs? Will we get new forms of interpretability, like an agent driving GDB, on a per-language basis? The languages won't go away, but the communities that swallow this tough pill and evolve will be the ones that survive. Developers mostly speak to other developers. It's like a couple of cows in a field going moo to each other, completely missing that the cows are headed for the abattoir. Grim, I know. Stop being a cow. Learn a bit about business. Speak with founders and investors. Learn to be a product engineer. If you're working at a company that has banned AI outright, you should quit that company. if your team is too busy doing their 'normal job' to experiment with AI, you're preparing them to be replaced When Ralph was published last year, I sat on it. People who have been reading this blog for a while know this. I first came across the idea of loop engineering in early January last year, sat on it for four months, and then started writing a lot, begging people Armin said the strongest signal for him isn't his own belief; it's that the experienced, vocal holdouts are turning. DHH was dismissive early on. Notch was dismissive and recently turned. Ben noticed that DHH was transparent about having tried AI for design, pulled it back, and now landed firmly on the other side. It felt like an invitation: come join me. Armin's worry is that because DHH is polarising, the message may not land as widely as it should. On where to find the signal: if you've been on X for the last two years, you're ahead of the game, because that's where all of this has happened. I don't love the platform; the number of AI reply bots is through the roof. But if you want the alpha, you have to push through. Go to the fediverse and talk about AI and you'll get your whole Mastodon instance banned. Bluesky has some high-alpha accounts. Unfortunately, the tech community has fractured along political lines, which means a lot of this isn't getting out. Multi Boxing LLMs Been doing heaps of thinking about how software is made after https://ghuntley.com/oh-fuck and the current design/UX approach by vendors of software assistants. IDEs, since 1983, have been designed around an exper