Serpentine software

The Gap Through Which We Praise the Machine

My current theory of agentic programming: people are amazing at adapting the tools they're given and totally underestimate the extent to which they do it, and the amount of skill we build doing that is an incidental consequence of how badly the tools are designed.

Can agentic coding raise the quality bar?

Five examples of using agentic coding to improve software quality, instead of delivery throughput.

Tools: Code Is All You Need

The solution to agentic flows was code all along.

Agents Done Right: A Framework Vision for 2026

Agents choke on context, loop on failures, and dump walls of code for review. It's time to rethink the architecture.

SlopCodeBench: Benchmarking How Coding Agents Degrade Over Long-Horizon Iterative Tasks

Software development is iterative, yet agentic coding benchmarks hide design issues through their single-shot setup. Recent iterative benchmarks attempt to remedy this but heavily constrain an agent's design decision space, making it impossible to faithfully measure how their decisions shape future extensions. We introduce SlopCodeBench, a benchmark of 36 problems and 196 checkpoints where agents repeatedly extend their own solutions. Unlike prior iterative benchmarks, our evolving specifications demand architectural decisions but leave internal structure to the agent. We measure two forms of degradation: structural erosion (concentrated complexity) and verbosity (redundant code). Evaluating 15 coding agents across open and closed models, we find that no agent fully solves any problem end-to-end, and the best agent passes 14.8% of checkpoints. Quality degrades across checkpoints, with structural erosion rising in 77% of trajectories and verbosity in 75.5%. Compared to 473 open-source Python repositories, agent code is 2.3x more verbose and 2.0x more eroded, and the human repositories degrade less often and by smaller margins across their git histories. Explicit quality guidance reduces initial verbosity and erosion by up to a third, without affecting degradation rates. SlopCodeBench provides the first measurement of code degradation under iterative extension, revealing that agents pass checkpoints while producing code that erodes and bloats with each turn.

SlopCodeBench: Benchmarking How Coding Agents Degrade Over Long-Horizon Iterative Tasks

Software development is iterative, yet agentic coding benchmarks overwhelmingly evaluate single-shot solutions against complete specifications. Code can pass the test suite but become progressively harder to extend. Recent iterative benchmarks attempt to close this gap, but constrain the agent’s design decisions too tightly to faithfully measure how code quality shapes future extensions. We introduce SlopCodeBench, a language-agnostic benchmark comprising 20 problems and 93 checkpoints, in which agents repeatedly extend their own prior solutions under evolving specifications that force architectural decisions without prescribing internal structure. We track two trajectory-level quality signals: verbosity, the fraction of redundant or duplicated code, and structural erosion, the share of complexity mass concentrated in high-complexity functions. No agent solves any problem end-to-end across 11 models; the highest checkpoint solve rate is 17.2%. Quality degrades steadily: erosion rises in 80% of trajectories and verbosity in 89.8%. Against 48 open-source Python repositories, agent code is 2.2x more verbose and markedly more eroded. Tracking 20 of those repositories over time shows that human code stays flat, while agent code deteriorates with each iteration. A prompt-intervention study shows that initial quality can be improved, but it does not halt degradation. These results demonstrate that pass-rate benchmarks systematically undermeasure extension robustness, and that current agents lack the design discipline iterative software development demands.

Deep Agents

Using an LLM to call tools in a loop is the simplest form of an agent. This architecture, however, can yield agents that are “shallow” and fail to plan and act over longer, more complex tasks. Applications like “Deep Research”, “Manus”, and “Claude Code” have gotten around this limitation by

Agent Skills

AI coding agents take the shortest path to done, which usually means skipping the specs, tests, and reviews that make software reliable at scale. Agent Skill...

Optimizing Agentic Workflows using Meta-tools

Agentic AI enables LLM to dynamically reason, plan, and interact with tools to solve complex tasks. However, agentic workflows often require many iterative reasoning steps and tool invocations,...

Does Code Cleanliness Affect Coding Agents? A Controlled Minimal-Pair Study

As autonomous coding agents see rapid adoption, their evaluation has primarily focused on task completion rates holding the target codebase fixed. This leaves a critical question unanswered: does the structural and stylistic quality, or ``cleanliness'' of the underlying code affect an agent's ability to navigate and modify it? To isolate the effect of code cleanliness from agent capability, we introduce an evaluation protocol built around minimal pairs: repositories that match on architecture, dependencies, and external behaviour, but differ on static-analysis rule violations and cognitive complexity. The pairs are constructed in both directions, by agent pipelines that either degrade a clean repository or clean a messy one. We author 33 tasks across six such pairs, evaluated through hidden tests at the application's public surface. Across 660 trials with Claude Code, code cleanliness does not change the agent's pass rate. However, it substantially alters the agent's operational footprint: agents working on cleaner code use 7 to 8% fewer tokens and reduce file revisitations by 34%. Our findings suggest that traditional maintainability principles remain highly relevant in the era of AI-driven development, shaping the computational cost and navigational efficiency of coding agents. Code cleanliness joins model choice, harness, and prompting as a factor that materially affects agent behaviours.

Write-Only Code | Heavybit

AI may be accelerating software into a world of "write-only" code that forces a rethink of culture, processes, and tools. Heavybit’s Joseph Ruscio explains.

LLMs Can Now Write GPU Kernels That Beat torch.compile - Break AI Scaling Limits in 7 Days

We're now seeing multi-agent systems that take your PyTorch code and produce CUDA or Triton kernels with 2x to 14x speedups over torch.compile(mode='max-autotune-no-cudagraphs'). Not on toy benchmarks. On real models like Llama-3.1-8B, Whisper, and Stable Diffusion. Learn proven techniques to shift the scaling law intercept and achieve 10-50% performance gains.

Inngest - Durable Execution for Workflows & AI

Build reliable background jobs, workflows, and AI agents without extra infrastructure. Automatic retries, flow control, and step-level observability.

Scaling long-running autonomous coding · Cursor

We've been experimenting with running coding agents autonomously for weeks at a time.