Patrick Smith

I built my site from scratch in WebAssembly. Using AI coding you can vibe wasm from fast C or Zig. I generated a Markdown renderer in Zig from the CommonMark spec. No Vite or React or frameworks, just me and my agent.

This is what LLM prompting is stealing away from designers. Each small step tinkering provides micro-feedback on what works / doesn’t work that builds your taste. The process of navigating these possibilities is what informs your design chops not a one-shotted end product.

@kentcdodds I expect it’ll be “code” more in the sense of what a SQL query planner does. Dynamic exploration through a graph of possibilities that become ever more granular. But that granularity will often be above “instruction” and more like “semantic HTML element”.

In the future the primary thing that agents will do is write code to accomplish the ad hoc queries from even non-technical users

@cassidoo You can iterate through a lot of ideas using AI. You can iterate through many in a day. Why not find the best idea?

I feel like this vibe is how I used to write code. I still do sometimes, but it feels "unproductive" now because I could just ship with AI and move on. But I enjoy the process! 😫 I miss that satisfaction.

@paulg We have tools to avoid reading changelogs, tools to avoid writing code, and tools to avoid reviewing colleagues’ code. If you become dependent on these I think long term you’ll become effectively illiterate, and have a hard time earning a decent salary. royalicing.com/2026/agents-of…

Something I told 14 yo: People are going to stop reading books. I wish this wasn't so, but I fear it is. The silver lining in this cloud is that if you're one of the few people who still read, you'll have a huge advantage over everyone else.

@thekitze 1. Shut Down your computer, uncheck Reopen windows 2. Put the computer in the attic or garage or somewhere out of the way 3. Take the power cable and stick it in a drawer on one side of the house

I WILL PAY FOR YOUR HELP!!! help me find a way to lock my mac computer after 10 o clock at night with a NO WORKOROUND. IT'S IMPOSSIBLE. I AM DESPERATE. I'VE HACKED EVERY TRAP THAT I'VE SET FOR MYSELF. PLEASE

@lemire It depends what sort of job. Web development is going to get more competitive with an over supply of labor. If you have deep systems knowledge, then I think your status goes up.

Is AI replacing software jobs in 5 years?

@threepointone Jobs jumped up, grabbed a marker, and drew a simple rectangle on a whiteboard. “Here’s the new application” he said. “It’s got one window. You drag your video into the window. Then you click the button that says burn. That’s it. That’s what we’re going to make.”

steve jobs would’ve hated model selector drop downs and the discourse around comparing versions and thinking levels

The people who still read won't just be better informed. They'll be (with a couple exceptions) the only ones who can think well. You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well.

@davidcrawshaw You don’t want to make it easier, you want to make it stricter. This makes debugging and observability easier, resource usage predictable, security tighter. You say “jump” and the coding agents say “how high?” so we want it to be rigorous.

@davidcrawshaw I think - typed but no generics - functions default to deterministic - static memory allocation - bounded loops - richer error handling (declare idempotent so can safely retry) - file and network have hard limits - inline tests and fuzzing

Some guesses about the future of programming languages, given agents write and humans read: - untyped - out of band formal verification - test harness runs code in a simulator vm to instrument the os - less expressive, more copying

@biwanczuk @deno_land This is probably what excites me most about coding agents, the same contract being fulfilled by multiple implementations that take different trade-offs

QuickJS is now passing 100% rusty_v8 and deno_core tests so we could swap out JS engine in @deno_land. Obv we're not gonna do that, but adding it as an option for `deno compile`d` apps is now feasible. Trade runtime perf for smaller binary size. There's a ton of people who'd do it.

@pdrmnvd If you look at the bugs they had at the start of the post, it’s more about handling IO resources and knowing when and where to clean them up

the zig vs bun thing boils down to one simple thing in the end: that you should simply be a perfect programmer who allocates memory perfectly and makes no mistakes. which is why the best programmers in the world use C, because they can write linux kernel code without a single CVE

New York Magazine by Susanna Hayward.

@shadcn Great design! What does flow affect?

How did we get there? Well, we looked at all of it: scale ratios, tracking, kerning, optical sizing, measure, leading, the space above and below every element. It was too much. Nobody wants to set a dozen variables to make markdown look right. So we condensed everything into three controls: size, leading, and flow. Everything else, heading sizes, list indents, the gap under a heading, the space around a rule, derive from them. Three knobs. Easy.

Introducing shadcn/typeset. You know how you render markdown and get back plain, unstyled HTML? Headings, paragraphs, lists, tables. So you style the elements one by one: font sizes, line heights, spacing. You do it for your blog. Then you do it again for docs. Then again for the chat. Every time, you're fighting the same thing: sizing and spacing. To fix this, we created typeset.css: one file that styles everything inside a typeset container. It lives in your project, so you can change it directly when you need to. And we made it work beautifully with streaming markdown.

@davidcrawshaw Do you think the level of abstraction needs to be different?

QIP components render any content and to <canvas>. This demo shows Markdown to HTML and a TypeScript syntax highlighter that runs in 0.5ms, and some interactive charts and UIs.

@ThePrimeagen I’m concerned many software developers are becoming effectively illiterate: royalicing.com/2026/agents-of…

I some how just spent 10 minutes looking at the replies here... people you are all insane

Article link: royalicing.com/2026/agents-of…

I’m concerned our software industry is drifting towards illiteracy.