Mario’s enthusiasm for his coding agent here and the sheer surface area of the pi project reminds me of how in a bygone era people used to fawn over their own text editors, the features that they implemented, their macros and speed of editing, lightweightness .etc. Coding agents may be the new “text editor” and the “emacs” vs. “vim” vs. “vscode” wars can finally be put to rest. The ubiquity of vscode already made the “emacs” vs. “vim” debate more of a shouting match between a bundle of contrarian geriatrics. The power of coding agents and the new era of “automatic programming” may be the final nail in the coffin for these lumbering piles of legacy inertia which we now have all the power to replace but no real need. For why should we use the means of mass production to support the rickety home shops of the past?

Anyway, more on the actual article what he’s done is really cool and features a lot of stuff that has proven to work at the forefront of automatic programming – he has a massive test suite against all major model providers, he runs his agent against known eval suites as well.