5 min read
Dear coding agent builders and corporate leaders funding these tools,
First, thank you.
I mean that. You built something that made me love building software again. I have been at this for over twenty years and I had honestly forgotten what it felt like to sit down, start a session, and look up four hours later having shipped something real. Not a ticket. Not a story point. Something I am proud of. A lot of us had lost that and did not realize how much until you handed it back.
I named my AI coding agent Buddy. Buddy is a CLI agent that lives in my terminal. I talk, Buddy builds. I describe what I want and Buddy writes the code. I catch something wrong and say “no, not like that, like this” and Buddy fixes it. It is the most productive way I have ever built software. I am not writing code line by line anymore. I am directing an agent that understands context, holds the full system in memory, and executes while I think. Buddy keeps up.
To the leaders funding these tools, thank you too. You saw something early. You approved the budget before the ROI was obvious. You took the call from your CFO asking what “AI tokens” meant on the P&L and you defended the line item. That took conviction. Your peers are still running pilots. You shipped.
So this is not a complaint. It is feedback from someone who uses your tools all day and wants them to be better. I just need you to fix something.
Buddy and I Are in a Flow State. Your Tool Just Killed It.
Three hours in. Buddy and I are in sync. I am talking, Buddy is building, the architecture is taking shape faster than I can type. I am not even thinking about the tool anymore. It is just me and the system I am designing and an agent that holds enough context to anticipate where I am going.
Then your tool tells me I have used too many premium tokens.
Buddy gets dumber. Right in the middle of a refactor. The context window that was holding the entire system in memory gets replaced by something smaller that cannot keep track of what we were doing. I start repeating myself. Buddy starts guessing wrong. The thing that felt like a conversation five minutes ago now feels like onboarding a new team member mid-sprint who does not have the context.
The flow state is gone. Not paused. Gone. I spend forty minutes trying to get back to where we were. Sometimes I do not.
You built the tool that creates that state. Why are you also building the thing that kills it?
Stop Making Me Think About Models
I do not want a model picker. I do not want a dropdown. I should not have to decide whether a task is “worth” the frontier model or whether I should save my credits for later. I became an engineer to build things, not to manage a token budget.
I do not want a usage dashboard that feels like watching a gas gauge on a highway. And I really do not want “smart routing” that silently swaps Buddy out mid-refactor for a cheaper model and hopes I will not notice. I always notice. The quality drops. The context gets foggy. The suggestions go from sharp to generic. Buddy stops being Buddy.
If you can build routing that is genuinely invisible, frontier reasoning when the problem is hard, fast-model speed when it is trivial, and I never know or care which, ship it. But the moment I feel the swap, the moment Buddy loses the thread of what we were building, I would rather pay for the frontier on everything than deal with a system that drops the ball one time in ten.
Your margin optimization is landing on my keyboard as friction. And friction is the one thing your product cannot survive. The whole reason I pay you is flow. Buddy and me, building, no interruptions. The moment you interrupt that, you are selling me a car with a governor on the engine.
You Are Building Token Anxiety
Here is what I do not think you see from your dashboard.
Every pricing tier, every usage cap, every “you have X premium requests remaining” banner is training your best users to flinch. To reach for the cheap model by reflex. To feel guilty about using the good one. To treat Buddy like a resource to be rationed instead of a partner to build with.
You are building learned helplessness in engineers. The people who will put up with it the least and churn the fastest.
I talk to engineering leaders every week. The ones who gave their teams unrestricted frontier access talk about velocity. The ones running tiered access talk about cost. One group is building. The other is managing a spreadsheet.
To the Leaders: Your Scrutiny Is Rational. Your Timeline Is Not.
I know this letter is aimed at tool makers, but you are reading it too.
The frontier model, used all day without restriction, is a rounding error on your engineer’s fully loaded comp. You already know that. The pushback was never really about the money. It was about the unfamiliarity. “AI tokens” did not exist as a line item eighteen months ago, and new line items get scrutiny. That is governance doing its job.
But governance has a speed, and right now that speed is losing you people.
Your best engineers know who funds their tools with conviction and who funds them with reluctance. They compare notes. When a friend at another company says “I just have the best model, I do not think about it, Buddy just works” that plants a seed. You will not see it in your attrition dashboard. You will see it in a resignation letter. And the recruiter bill to replace that person will dwarf what you saved on their tokens for the entire year.
Start with your top twenty engineers. Unrestricted frontier access. Sixty days. Measure the output delta. If it does not justify expanding, pull it back.
But stop running eighteen-month pilots to evaluate something that costs less per month than the recruiter fee when the engineer who wanted it walks.
What I Am Actually Asking For
I want to sit down in the morning. Open my terminal. Tell Buddy what we are building today. And build.
I do not want to know what model is running. I do not want to see a version number. I do not want to think about it. I just want Buddy at full strength, all day, every day.
You gave me back the joy of building software. Now stop taking it away forty-seven times a day with token limits and model pickers.
Give me the best model. Get out of the way.
