How AI Coding Agents Will Change Your Job

**David Lieb** (0:00)
People have strong reactions when they think, oh, the job that I do or my friends do might go away. But if you look backwards at history, the first computer programmers that existed, they didn't do a job that was anywhere like today's software engineers.

**Tom Blomfield** (0:14)
These tools give high agency individual superpowers. So if you are a potential founder thinking about starting something, I don't think there's been any point in history that's been better than today for starting an idea, because you can just do so much more than you would have been able to even last year.

**David Lieb** (0:36)
Welcome back to another episode of The Breakdown. Today, we're going to talk about recent advances in AI, specifically coding agents, and how they might change the future of how we do work. Tom, you wrote some tweets recently.

**Tom Blomfield** (0:49)
Annoyed some people.

**David Lieb** (0:49)
Tell us about that.

**Tom Blomfield** (0:51)
Yeah, you know, like any good tweets optimize for engagement, they upset a lot of people. I put this tweet out which basically compared software engineers to kind of highly paid organic farmers, basically tending their crops by hand.
And I suggested there was a technological revolution coming, the Combine Harvester. And as a result of the Combine Harvester, humanity produced way more food, but employed way fewer farmers. And I suggested that something similar is going to happen in software engineering. And this upset a lot of people, particularly in certain software engineering circles, it was not highly regarded. I think that's fair to say. But I followed up with a longer blog post where I tried to think through the sort of where we are today is we've got these coding agents, which sort of work for some tasks. They're not perfect, but there are certain, I think we have a clear line of sight between where we are today and improvements over the next three, six, and 12 months. They're going to have quite stark consequences for software engineering, I think. And if you think that through, what does that mean for startups and the tech world in general? And then even beyond that, what does it mean for other kind of knowledge work? Doctors, lawyers, accountants, perhaps we'll come to that. But for now, let's stick with the central idea that we've invented automation of software engineering.

**David Lieb** (2:09)
Maybe you should walk us through how you got to this conclusion, because it's not just you pontificating. You used these tools and came to this conclusion organically. Maybe tell us about that.

**Tom Blomfield** (2:20)
Yeah, totally. So in our job, as you know, Dave, we talked to a lot of startup founders who are building stuff every day, and we both built products a lot of people have used. And honestly, I kind of missed that process of building, of launching something. If I was going to give advice to these founders every day, I felt like I should at least be using some of these tools to figure out what was going on in the world. And so about two months ago now, I started with no-code tools like Lovable and Replit to build just a couple of little games, like my favorite word game when I was a kid I rebuilt. And honestly, I was pretty shocked at how good they'd gotten. You know, I tried it six or nine months ago. They weren't that good. But this time around, I built the game and then I moved on to tools like Cursor and Windsurf and Claude Code. My blog, tomblomfield.com, get the plug in there, has been on Tumblr for like 20 years or something. And so the next project was to like rebuild my blog, which I did in 90 minutes on a train journey with Claude Code. And in 90 minutes, I set up hosting, I wrote new blogging software, and I migrated like 15 years of blog posts over to the new platform.
And I was kind of astonished. And then I went even further, and I built recipeninja.ai. Got to get the plug in for that as well..ai.

**David Lieb** (3:34)
You couldn't afford it.

**Tom Blomfield** (3:34)
I couldn't, no. And that turned into like more of a serious project. You know, it's now like 35,000 lines of code. There are thousands of people using the site. It has a full interactive voice agent. It's not a simple crud app. It is an interactive voice agent.

**David Lieb** (3:48)
And just to be clear, you built this in the vibe coding mode, where you literally wrote zero lines of those codes.

**Tom Blomfield** (3:55)
35,000 lines and I wrote not a single one. And honestly, after about the first 5,000 lines, I stopped even reading the code. You know, I just like prompt, I'd auto accept, I'd go and make a coffee and I'd come back and a new feature was built. And again, it wasn't perfect. There are still rough edges. I used to be a professional software developer. I do know how to write code and how to architect projects. But with that little bit of knowledge, I became extremely dangerous, you know? I've not written code professionally for probably 10 years. These new tools made me 10 times more powerful, more productive than I was when I was kind of current in software engineering 10 years ago. I kind of started thinking like what happens when other software engineers start using these tools, many of them already are. What happens when semi-technical people start using them? And what happens when non-technical people start using them? And that's kind of what I want to spend some of the time talking about today. Have you seen companies in your group using these tools yet?