AI Coding

I almost tweeted the Fable 5 launch post yesterday afternoon. Karpathy called it a “major-version-bump-deserving step change forward.” Alex Albert, Boris Cherny, Thariq, Garry Tan — all in. The first two stories on Hacker News were Fable derivatives. The timeline was begging me to do it. Then I opened the GitHub monthly leaderboard. mattpocock/skills added 56k stars in a month and cracked the top five.¹ Leonxlnx/taste-skill (a skill that teaches your AI taste) and hardikpandya/stop-slop (a skill that removes AI tells from prose) hit the same monthly chart the same month.² ³ Not one of them has “Fable” in the name. None of them are riding the model hype. They all do the same thing: make what the AI writes faster to review. ...

It is tempting to look at today’s coding agents and believe that backend development is about to become a one-shot prompt. I do not buy it. Not because LLM agents cannot write code. They clearly can. They can add endpoints, patch CRUD flows, generate migrations, update tests, and edit multiple files with impressive speed. The real problem is more annoying: the most important parts of a backend system are often not written in the first line of the ticket. ...

A line I saw this week was a little too accurate: the problem right now is not that we do not have enough agents. The problem is that we do not have enough work to give them. The original post came from Zara Zhang: https://x.com/zarazhangrui/status/2046662237306421608 I laughed when I first read it, not because it was exaggerated, but because it felt uncomfortably close to the truth. To avoid hiding the sources behind linked anchor text only, here are the primary source URLs up front: ...