The Brute Squad

The third report from Steve's front-row seat on the AI-coding shift, written three months after Revenge of the Junior Developer and structured as five dispatches: the death of the IDE, vibe coding on the edge, the rise of the vibe coder, "The Endgame," and why you should be excited. The thesis lands in Part 1 — Steve sets up two beloved IDEs on a new laptop and then never opens them again, because agentic coding has moved to the terminal: "console based, 1970s-style." His new job, he decides, is to produce code, not write it. The middle parts turn confessional and funny: the agents are hungry "baby camels," agentic coding is a slot machine of intermittent dopamine-and-adrenaline hits, and the productivity gap is becoming a management crisis — devs shipping PRs 10× faster, companies weighing whether to displace the holdouts, and "token spend per developer per unit time" floated (via Matt Beane) as the new health metric.

Part 4 is the set piece: a half-hour audience with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who calls 2026 "The Endgame" — tech as the unstoppable force meeting society as the immovable object, a collision "mostly helpful and awesome" but bound to throw shockwaves. The title is the payoff, drawn straight from The Princess Bride: traditional coding is Vizzini, Cursor upgrades you to Inigo Montoya, a single agent makes you Fezzik — but run four or five at once and you are the Brute Squad. The piece doubles as the public runway for Vibe Coding, the book with Gene Kim, and an endorsement of Sourcegraph's Amp. Read alongside the Gas Town essays, it reads as a forecast of the agent-fleet world Steve would spend the next year actually building.