With Claude Code, you’re stuck in AI mode all the time (which is slow for running vanilla terminal commands) or you have to have a second window for just terminal commands.
Edit: just read some documentation saying Claude has a “bash mode” where it will actually pass through the commands, so off to try that out now.
Why suddenly agentic coding?
It is a handy AI-cli for any terminal. I've been using the "terminal" app for a few months and found it was a very competent coding tool. I kept giving feedback to the team that they should "beef up" the coding side because until Claude Code this was my daily driver for writing code until Opus 4. The interface still is a bit janky because i think it's trying to predict whether you're typing a console command or talking to it for new prompt (it tries to dynamical assess that but often enough it crosses the streams). Regardless, I highly recommend checking it out, I've had some great success with it.
Can we please standardize this and just have one markdown file that all the agents can use?
I've got an Ollama instance (24GB VRAM) I want to leverage to try and reduce dependency on Claude Code. Even the tech stack seems unapproachable. I've considered LiteLLM, router agents, micro-agents (smallest slice of functionality possible), etc. I haven't wrapped my head around it all the way, though.
Ideally, it would be something like:
UI <--> LiteLLM
^
|
v
Agent Shim
I'm just spitballing here.
Thoughts? (my email is in my profile if you would prefer to continue there)
You can use a LLM router to direct questions to an optimal model on a price/performance pareto frontier. I have a plugin for Bifrost that does this, Heimdall (https://github.com/sibyllinesoft/heimdall), it's very beta right now but the test coverage is good, I just haven't paved the integration pathway yet.
I've got a number of products in the works to manage context automatically, enrich/tune rag, provide enhanced code search. Most of them are public and you can poke around and see what I'm doing. I plan on doing a number of launches soon but I like to build rock solid software and rapid agentic development really creates a large manual qa/acceptance eval burden.
Things like self hosting and data privacy, model optionality too.
Plenty of companies still don’t want to ship their code, agreement or not over to these vendors or be locked into their specific model.
The differentiator is the fact that the scaling myth was a lie. The GPT-5 flop should make that obvious enough. These guys are spending billions and can't make the models show more than a few % improvement. You need to actually innovate, e.g. tricks like MoE, tool calling, better cache utilization, concurrency, better prompting, CoT, data labeling, and so on.
Not two weeks ago some Chinese academics put out a paper called Deep Think With Confidence where they coaxed GPT-OSS-120B into thinking a little longer causing it to perform better on benchmarks than it did when OpenAI released it.
The smaller startups like cursor or windsurf are not competing on foundational model development. So whether new models are generationally better is not relevant to them.
A cursor is competing with Claude code and both use Claude Sonnet.
Even if Cursor was running a on par model on their own GPUs their inference costs will not as cheap as those of Anthropic just because they would not be operating at the same scale . Larger DCs means better deals, more knowledge about running an inference better because they are also doing much larger training runs.
You need different relationships at different parts of coding, ideation, debugging, testing, etc. Cleverly sharing context while maintaining different flows and respecting the relationship hygiene is the key. Most of the vscode extensions now do this with various system prompt selections of different "personas".
I used to (6 months ago) compare these agentic systems basically as if they were John Wayne as contract programmer, parachuting in a project, firing off their pistol, shooting the criminals, mayor, and burning the barn down all the while you're yelling at it to behave better.
There's contexts and places where this can be more productive. Warp is one of them if executed with clean semantic perimeters. It's in a rather strong positioning for it and an obvious loyalty builder
Reference: Browser Company
(2) A Microsoft VP of product spends enough time writing code to be a relevant testimonial?
I see this similarly to the way I would have a work session with a more junior dev where sometimes during the chat I would "drop down in abstraction" to show them how I'd code a specific function, but I don't want to take over - I'm giving them a bit of direction, and it's up to them to either keep my code or ignore/rewrite it to better suit their approach.
Claude Code can replicate some of the behavior, but it’s too slow to switch in and out of command / agent flows.
this concerns me given what I've seen generated by these tools. In 10? 5? 1? year(s) are we going to see an influx of CVEs or hiring of Senior+ level developers solely for the purpose of cleaning up these messes?
But as for eventually having to hire senior developers to clean up the mess, I do expect that. Most organizations that think they can build and ship reliable products without human experts probably won’t be around long enough to be able to have actual CVEs issued. But larger organizations playing this game will eventually have to face some kind of reckoning.
Did they? Their original product was a terminal emulator, with built-in telemetry, that required you to create an account to use.
giancarlostoro•5mo ago