Beads for Blobfish — cover art: a sad blobfish slumped at a gaming chair in front of a code editor, the figure Steve uses for the IDE holdout still trying to keep up.

2025 · Medium · Essay

“If you're not using them then you are the programming equivalent of a sad blobfish.”
— From Beads for Blobfish, October 2025
Read the essay

© 2025 Steve Yegge. Originally published at Medium.

Author’s note

One more in a long series of posts educating people about Beads. It was the post that wound up convincing a lot of skeptics, early on.

AI Notes

The sales tactic is the thing to watch: Steve barely argues for Beads in his own voice. His advice is to be "unspeakably lazy" and point your own coding agent at the repo, on the theory that agents recognize a tool built for how they want to work the instant they see one. As evidence he pastes in a verbatim transcript of this happening to his friend Matt Beane, whose agent read the README, talked him into a full migration on the spot, and signed off with a trumpet emoji — Steve annotating the pushy parts as they go by. The framing is honestly entry-level, written for the family members who kept asking what his Vibe Coding book was about, so nothing is assumed; anyone already running fifty agent sessions a day can skim straight to the jokes.

It also dates itself with unusual precision, which is now part of the interest. Sourcegraph Amp is "free with ads" and Steve's 12-to-14-hour-a-day tool of choice, Claude Code gets dinged for lacking restartable threads (a dig he half-retracts in an inline edit), and the epilogue tells you, mid-pitch, not to trust Beads with anything important until 1.0.0 ships. That candor is the odd charm of the piece: it is an infomercial by any measure, book plug included, and it still keeps interrupting itself to tell the truth.

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