June 14, 2026
What I love about building with agents is that I can just rip through bits of polish and extra “connective tissue” that makes the product “feel good”. It’s all stuff I’d imagined in my head in the past but just could not justify building out in order to get things shipped on time.
I honestly believe, with agents, I’m building the best software I’ve ever built.
s/o to the little machine that churns out all the code.
An example from today. I was building Macro’s CLI and one of my goals was to make it zero-config.
I’ve used plenty of developer CLIs and there’s always something extra you need to do, whether it’s brew/npm install, login, set some token somewhere etc. It’s not a big deal but it’s annoying. Annoying enough I’ve sometimes delayed setting up a CLI.
For Macro’s CLI I was able to just design away all those little bits of friction (with the agent brute forcing the code). The Desktop app comes with the CLI automatically bundled and auto-installed. No brew/npm install, no worrying about versions. It auto-updates along with the Desktop app. No stupid warnings about being on an old version. It’s pretty standard to ask a user to install the developer CLI but I think we can do better.
And if you login on the Desktop app, the CLI gets authenticated too. I am tired of clicking links that say “Link didn’t open, paste this into your browser”. Again, it was just a bunch of extra piping to get this working. And the agent knocks it out in mere minutes. It would have taken me a half a day.
Interestingly, none of these features are ones the agent will automatically do for you when you ask it to “build a CLI for my product”. Even if you keep prompting it to “make the UX better” it’s not going to find these (at least not yet). It’s still useful to know how things work and how subsystems could interconnect better. Building products with agents, I feel like an interior decorator who has a feel for how the room should flow and can instantly command my labor force to move the furniture and repaint the walls till it all feels just the way I like.
I think the trick to finding these rough edges and missing bridges is to run into them and feel them. Feel them in products you use but most importantly feel them in the products you build. I don’t think a diff, or a screenshot, or even an agent created video let you feel the friction or the joy. You must use it yourself. That’s the whole reason I’ve been building Macro. I want to employ the insanely powerful, fairly low-cost code writing machine to write code and I want it to feel effortless to jump in and feel out what’s been built. I want to run my fingers down the grain and find out where we need to keep sanding. I want to walk through the room and find out where I felt irritated and where I felt joy, for myself.
I reject the inevitability of AI written software being slop.
Yes, some people will ship sloppy products. But you and I don’t have to. The product you ship is still a reflection of you, what you value, what you prioritize and what you and your agent choose to work on. Just like it’s always been.