Leaning into agentic coding: (almost) a year in (short) review

Last year, while I was marooned in France, I wrote a bit of a reflection on my stance of using generative AI to write software. I don't pretend - in this moment - like it's a bit of a double edged sword: I don't pay for things like Antrophic or OpenAI, given their explicit involvement in being used for violence. However, there's nothing stopping the eventual transition of large government agencies to newer open models built from the ground up from the millions of documents used for public policy and law - something that I wouldn't be surprised if it was underway. It would have to be open (at least a version of it on declassified information) since it's (the documents produced) funded publicly. But then again, we don't have federal or municipal telephony services nor Internet services. My approach to model work has been the following: 90% cloud solutions: Ollama Cloud, Minimax, Z.AI, Poolside, Deepseek, Copilot and OpenCode Go 10% local models: GGUF'd shrunk models running on a very…