Agentic coding is everywhere

AI coding agents are increasingly used to build and maintain the Astro web framework, with its repository containing an AGENTS.md file and commits co-authored by Claude and GitHub Copilot, signaling a shift toward commoditized code where authorship becomes irrelevant.

I use a very cool and relatively new web framework called Astro https://www.infoworld.com/article/3842325/designing-a-dynamic-web-application-with-astro-js.html . The keen insight that the Astro team had was that most websites are made up of static content, so they made it really easy to add content to a website. To add a blog post to my personal website https://nickhodges.com , all I have to do is create a Markdown file with some front matter, deploy it, and the blog post automatically appears. If I need to reach deeper for more dynamic functionality, I can easily do that with TypeScript https://www.infoworld.com/article/2257305/what-is-typescript-strongly-typed-javascript.html , React https://www.infoworld.com/article/2253289/react-tutorial-get-started-with-the-reactjs-javascript-library.html , or almost any other framework. It’s really cool. And these days, I really don’t write any code. Claude Code https://www.infoworld.com/article/4136718/claude-code-is-blowing-me-away.html does most all? of the work. Since Astro is an open-source project https://github.com/withastro/astro and has excellent documentation https://docs.astro.build/ , Claude knows all about how Astro works. It has no trouble at all managing my site and making the improvements I ask for. And that got me thinking, how does Astro get built? Is the Astro team building with agentic coding? Astro itself has many dependencies, including big projects like Vite and Node. And of course, Vite and Node have dependencies, too. Are those dependencies being developed by hand, or are those development teams also using AI agents to code? My curiosity got the best of me, and I asked Claude to dig deeper. It turns out that the Astro repository has an AGENTS.md https://github.com/withastro/astro/blob/main/AGENTS.md file, and some of the commits even have commit message trailers indicating that they were at least co-authored by Claude and GitHub Copilot https://www.infoworld.com/article/3609013/github-copilot-everything-you-need-to-know.html . Further down, there is a .agents/skills directory with skills covering development, merging, triage, and more. I poked around for a look, and someone has done a great job building agentic support. Now my interest is really piqued, and further investigation reveals quite a bit of interesting stuff. About a year ago, documentation started appearing about how to build Astro sites with coding agents. Around that same time, the docs team released an MCP server https://www.infoworld.com/article/4029634/what-is-model-context-protocol-how-mcp-bridges-ai-and-external-services.html that gives developers coding agents deeper, easier access to the Astro documentation. And there are small steps in the Astro codebase that indicate it is “agentic ready.” For instance, the command-line development server can tell when it is being started by an agent, and the application itself can tell if it is being driven by an agent. Small things, but steps in the direction of embracing Astro developers who use coding agents. Okay, that was a fun spelunking trip. But so what? The “so what” is that code is going to be commoditized. As an Astro developer I am using AI agents pretty much all of the time. The Astro development team is starting to use AI agents more and more. The folks building the Astro dependencies are using AI agents. Shoot, the people building Claude Code and the agents themselves are “eating their own dogfood” and using their own tools to build the next frontier model https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement . Before we know it, it will be turtles all the way down https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles all the way down . No one says “who generated that electricity?” or “who wove the fabric in that shirt?” any more. And it won’t be long before no one says “Who wrote the code for that app?” because it won’t matter. Just as we don’t look at the assembly code written by our compilers, we’ll stop looking at the “regular” code written by our agents. I’m not even sure anyone is writing assembly code anymore https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39587051 . Soon we’ll be saying that about TypeScript, Python, and C++.