Notes from the agent coding (not quite) vanguard

Everything is weirder and more capable. Models are way better at many things, unattended coding in particular. But, to everyone’s dismay, that causes them to write in a tedious style of English. There’s plenty of room for humanity in between the tokens. 1. Models & harnesses Frontier lab models, despite their quirks, feel like they will graduate to boring technology soon. When the servers are healthy, you can rely on Anthropic and OpenAI’s models to get work done. Cursor’s in-house models (probably other labs too, I haven’t tried Kimi, GLM, etc.) are solid enough to pinch-hit for frontier models when the inference servers are buggy. Harnesses, when they’re relatively bug-free, are basically just as reliable. You can use the frontier labs (I’m still on Claude Code, mostly) to get most sorts of stuff done. You could substitute Cursor, Pi, or most of the others to personal taste. And, personal taste is increasingly a thing across the harnesses. Claude Code is very much for the terminal…