Revenge of the Junior Developer

Written three weeks after coding agents first knocked Steve sideways ("I myself could scarcely believe what I was seeing") and only weeks after Karpathy christened "vibe coding," this is a report from the opening days of the agent era, shipped in a hurry after several fatter drafts "grew huge and rabid" and had to be put down like Old Yeller. It works two registers at once. One is vaudeville: a coding agent is a free camel, a huge upgrade over walking, except that it spits, bites, and requires large amounts of leafy green food, "primarily fifties and hundreds." The other is a deadpan budget memo addressed to CIOs, doing arithmetic on what per-developer token burn does to an FY26 opex plan that was locked in weeks before any of this existed; one company's $25-a-day allowance, judged almost recklessly generous at planning time, comes in for particular pity. As the preamble promises, the revenge of the title waits for the very end, "just like in the movies."

As a prediction piece it begs to be scored, and Steve knew it: he calls himself "just some dude" and admits that Claude, after a long argument, would only rate the timeline plausible with every estimate stretched by six months. The shakiest plank is the productivity ladder, where each wave is declared "conservatively about 5x as productive" as the one before, a number asserted rather than derived. And the confidence rested on remarkably little hardware: when Steve drew agent fleets at the chart's far edge, he had personally run exactly two agents in parallel.