







Specifications do not address the limitations of agentic coding
Can agentic coding raise the quality bar?
Five examples of using agentic coding to improve software quality, instead of delivery throughput.

How coding agents work - Agentic Engineering Patterns
How coding agents work - Agentic Engineering Patterns
oracle/agent-spec
Open Agent Spec (Agent Spec) is a framework-agnostic declarative language for defining agentic systems. It defines building blocks for standalone agents and structured agentic workflows as well as common ways of composing them into multi-agent systems.
Writing code is cheap now - Agentic Engineering Patterns
Writing code is cheap now - Agentic Engineering Patterns

Code Is Cheap Now, And That Changes Everything | Pere Villega
AI coding agents have made code production nearly free. Drawing on insights from Kent Beck, Paul Ford, and Simon Willison, this post argues that the value has shifted from writing code to defining systems — contracts, invariants, SLAs, and verification.

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...

Same Model, Different Results: Why Coding Agents Aren't Interchangeable
Reverse-engineering Claude Code reveals why it performs differently from other agents that use the same Anthropic models. The answer lies in sophisticated context engineering and tool orchestration hidden beneath the surface.

Agentic Engineering Patterns - Simon Willison's Weblog
Patterns for getting the best results out of coding agents like Claude Code and OpenAI Codex. See my introduction for more on this project.
Agent Design Is Still Hard
My Agent abstractions keep breaking somewhere I don’t expect.

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.

The Coding Agent Data Deal
On user data control, coding agents as retrievers, and the value of your coding transcripts

The Coding Agent Data Deal
On user data control, coding agents as retrievers, and the value of your coding transcripts

Coding Agents Are Easy, Actually - Kara's Nonsense
Software engineering is here to stay
Qwen3-Coder: Agentic Coding in the World
GITHUB HUGGING FACE MODELSCOPE DISCORD Today, we’re announcing Qwen3-Coder, our most agentic code model to date. Qwen3-Coder is available in multiple sizes, but we’re excited to introduce its most powerful variant first: Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct — a 480B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with 35B active parameters which supports the context length of 256K tokens natively and 1M tokens with extrapolation methods, offering exceptional performance in both coding and agentic tasks. Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct sets new state-of-the-art results among open models on Agentic Coding, Agentic Browser-Use, and Agentic Tool-Use, comparable to Claude Sonnet 4.