State of Agentic Coding #6 with Armin and Ben
Every voice is named by two or more agreeing sources.
“world's fair last year and that was like a real eye -opener for really this whole field”
Ben found the World's Fair conference to be an eye‑opener for the AI field.
“and because i messed up it was actually very funny”
Armin recounts a flight mishap that turned into a humorous situation.
“That's what we're predicting.”
They think compute costs will become more expensive.
“We should actually, let's Vibe generate a website, which is just tracking RAM versus the price of gold.”
Ben suggests building a site to monitor RAM prices against gold.
“256 gigs went up big time.”
He notes a sharp price increase for 256 GB RAM modules.
“One consequence was hard drives are getting expensive.”
Hard drives have become noticeably more expensive.
“And helium is important for semiconductor manufacturing.”
Helium plays a key role in making semiconductors.
“I'm guessing that's just generally the cost of energy will go up.”
Energy prices are expected to rise.
“So for instance, I think like Caterpillar stock went up like crazy because people figured out”
Caterpillar's stock surged as demand for data‑center construction grew.
“What I do know is that David highlighted that it found, I think he said like a hundred”
The Worden harness reportedly discovered about a hundred vulnerabilities in Sentry.
“It's not like really truly the end, like clearly things are still subsidized, but it feels like”
He predicts that subsidies are ending despite some remaining support.
“Greptile is a code review tool.”
He recommends the Greptile code review tool.
“And I think I just got the bill and it's like, hey, surprise, $800, right?”
Their AI service bill jumped to $800.
“They're very small margins.”
Margins on AI services are now minimal.
“reading a lot about the industrial revolution because i think a lot of it is really really relevant”
He believes lessons from the industrial revolution apply to current AI economics.
“If you're not familiar with it, go check it out.”
Ben suggests listeners listen to the Syntax 1000 podcast episode.
“It's like, there's the risk with this is always also that like, you might not just fuck up the business, you might also fuck up your relationship, right?”
Armin warns that business deals can damage personal relationships.
“Prediction for listeners, put it in the comments.”
Ben asks listeners to predict the next AI‑coding acquisition.
“Musk is going to merge everything together into a massive conglomerate.”
Armin predicts Elon Musk will consolidate many companies into a single conglomerate.
“They do some sort of transaction where they basically pay Cursor for $10 billion for services with an option to acquire them for $60 billion.”
Armin describes a proposed $10 billion service deal with an option to buy Cursor for $60 billion.
“the valuations have gone so crazy which is hat tip to cursor a couple years ago this was a vs code fork turned into a 60 billion dollar acquisition”
Cursor’s VS Code fork was acquired for $60 billion, highlighting extreme valuations.
“the value of traces i think has been sufficiently understood by a lot of players in that space”
Armin believes many in the industry now grasp the importance of code traces.
“github exploded twice as of right now i still don't see all my pull requests because their elastic search cluster made a booboo”
Armin recounts GitHub’s recent outages and search failures causing pull‑request visibility issues.
“this was a kind of a little bit of an exciting moment for source control.”
Ben calls the recent developments in source control an exciting moment.
“but like subversion, a lot of stuff in it, which was just actually not really good.”
Armin criticises Subversion as fundamentally flawed.
“one of the reasons why I didn't have a lower GitHub ID was because I was boycotting it for a little while”
Armin explains his early GitHub ID was high because he boycotted the platform.
“people were kind of in the tank for one depending on your religion.”
Ben remarks on how community attitudes varied based on personal affiliations.
“ran their own server so I ran a server that had my subversion”
Armin describes running his own Subversion server to host projects.
“that venture funds were already looking for like now is the time to rebuild a whole bunch of stuff”
He says venture capital is ready to fund new platforms right now.
“VCs looking to fund GitHub alternatives because they also feel like there's going to be a space for like human and Asian collaboration”
He notes VCs see opportunity for GitHub alternatives focused on collaboration.
“And actually, this has been a project that's been going back maybe like six or seven weeks,”
Ben describes the ongoing development of his TermDraw project.
“I took pictures of the ASCII drawing and I was comparing to how good it did with the ASCII drawing.”
Armin experimented by photographing ASCII art to test the agent's understanding.
“I think it would work slightly better if you would pick something else than Braille characters, is my guess.”
He suggests using a different character set than Braille for better results.
“Opus 4 .7 actually makes significantly better ASCII diagrams than 4 .6.”
The newer Opus 4.7 version improves ASCII diagram quality compared to 4.6.
“You know, Disqus, like, we worked on that because we were nerds.”
Ben recounts his experience working on Disqus as a nerdy project.
“Disqus sold to a data broker for, I don't know, 70, 90 million years ago.”
Disqus was sold to a data broker for a large, undisclosed sum.
“So, look, to answer your prediction, I think that society has demonstrated that as long as they get enough value, they really don't care.”
Ben believes society tolerates data practices as long as it receives sufficient value.
“But right now, my prediction is we're going to figure out that some bunch of older companies are going to figure out that they are sitting on a treasure trove, and they're going to find out that there are some companies right now which are giving ridiculous sums of money for that treasure trove, and they're going to not be able to resist.”
Older companies will discover valuable data troves and be unable to resist selling them for huge sums.
“I want the slow, painful, hard work to be rewarded, not the bullshit.”
He wants effort to be recognized rather than shortcuts.
“However, I think in a long run, open source software kind of tends to win because it's just – it makes it too hard for other people to compete in the space.”
He believes open source will dominate because it raises the barrier for competitors.
“Like my ideal outcome in a couple of years is like copyrights are worth a lot less and we all have powerful LLMs to help with authentic tasks and we can run them where we are and not”
He predicts copyrights will lose value and powerful LLMs will be widely usable locally.
“Maybe it could – just to bring it even back to GitHub, the fact that anybody can leave GitHub is because Git is open source.”
He notes that GitHub's openness stems from Git being open source.