The Brute Squad

Steve's author note above calls this one forced, and he has a point about the closing stretch, which slides into a pitch for Sourcegraph's Amp and the Vibe Coding book without much disguise. The middle is livelier than he allows. This is the essay where he owns up to the addiction: agentic coding as a slot machine, dopamine on the good pulls, adrenaline on the bad ones, and a nightly escape plan for getting to bed by 2am that involves setting every agent spinning at once and sprinting from the room with his fingers in his ears. The reporting under the clowning is darker than the tone lets on. Big companies were privately telling Sourcegraph they might "displace" up to 60% of engineers who refused to switch, and token spend per developer was being floated as a corporate health metric — a claim Steve undercuts himself, conceding there is no data behind it yet and inviting readers to "pounce and call bullshit on every word of this post."

The reason to read it anyway is Part 4: a private half hour with Dario Amodei at Anthropic HQ in April 2025, which Steve narrates chiefly as an apology for his own performance in the room (he blames "Dipshit Rays from Outer Space") while still coming home with a franker, less varnished Amodei than the one who briefs journalists. Whatever the essay around it amounts to, that half hour is a primary source. Add the running bit about programmers who insist on spit-shining cars by hand while everyone else drives through the car wash, which does more argumentative work than any statistic in the piece, and Steve's own middling grade starts to look a little harsh.