Bet on getting Sherlocked
Core ideas:
- If a feature makes agentic work better, the Big AI Companies will add and maintain the best version
- Bespoke harness strategies are only useful for bespoke SDLC needs, or for a few months of uncopied novelty
- We developers need to pragmatically discern where to focus our creative energies
This is about a John Henry story happening in layers - developer skill vs machines, indie devs vs giant corporations. There is an element of mourning as skills are recategorized from professional to hobbyist, and as every advantage John Henry creates becomes a roadmap item for the machines to self-embed.
Developers are irresistibly drawn to creating tools for their tools. I see endless tutorials and iterations on setting up workspaces, knowledge graphs, multi-agent management, prompt caching, etc. But if you’re working in an agentic environment like Cursor, Codex, Claude Code or Antigravity, those companies are far more incentivized and equipped to embed those features. Ironically, some of the projects I see are actually lagging behind the Big Companies, because developers don’t realize how complex those enterprise products are. A billion-dollar AI company can copy the best indie ideas in their sleep, literally.
All the obvious features started as tinkerer projects, and immediately became table stakes in the industry - prompt caching, file indexing, model selection, git-based versioning. Advanced features like custom LLMs for file compare and knowledge graphs, or whatever the latest white-paper open-source improvements are, have mere days of Twitter fanfare and blog posts before the Big Companies embed an elite version.
As researchers and builders, we still need to keep “sharpening the axe”, understanding the tech and dreaming about better systems. But increasingly, we need to be aware of what the tools are already doing for us, and when they’re good enough, and humbly recognize that shareholder-value-driven companies with agents have maximum incentive. An esoteric, fad harness can be just as confounding to maintain as vibe-coded slop.
In 2024, when Copilot demonstrated somewhat serviceable coding capabilities, many indie tinkerers like myself built git-enhanced loops around the LLMs to facilitate fully vibe-coded work. Those who were not in R&D were astounded by the demo of a prompted static web game. To us then, and to everyone in retrospect, the latest developer tools were inevitable. It’s the same thing now. We can spend our cycles doing free R&D for the Big Companies (and because it’s fun and irresistible to tinker, I will!), but we also have to start categorizing work into “uniquely mine to figure out” and “inevitably Sherlocked”.