Agentic Coding

In the Agentic Coding article, Simon WIllson talks about the Agentic Coding: The Future of Software Development with Agents YouTube talk from Armin Ronacher.

I picked up a bunch of useful tips from this video:

  • Armin runs Claude Code with the --dangerously-skip-permissions option, and says this unlocks a huge amount of productivity. I haven't been brave enough to do this yet but I'm going to start using that option while running in a Docker container to ensure nothing too bad can happen.
  • When your agentic coding tool can run commands in a terminal you can mostly avoid MCP - instead of adding a new MCP tool, write a script or add a Makefile command and tell the agent to use that instead. The only MCP Armin uses is the Playwright one.
  • Combined logs are a really good idea: have everything log to the same place and give the agent an easy tool to read the most recent N log lines.
  • While running Claude Code, use Gemini CLI to run sub-agents, to perform additional tasks without using up Claude Code's own context
  • Designing additional tools that provide very clear errors, so the agents can recover when something goes wrong.
  • Thanks to Playwright, Armin has Claude Code perform all sorts of automated operations via a signed in browser instance as well. "Claude can debug your CI... it can sign into a browser, click around, debug..." - he also has it use the gh GitHub CLI tool to interact with things like GitHub Actions workflows.

I would add to this list a link to the Agentic Coding Recommendations blog post of Armin.

Agentic Coding: The Future of Software Development with Agents