Agentic Development Environments
I have been using Conductor.app for quite some time now and I’m pretty amazed by how much it streamlines the flow of creating software. It takes what IDEs once promised even further, connecting all the places where context lives and using it to produce software.
I think using one of those tools is critical in this new world of writing software with AI. It’s not easy to start with it, I think, since the change from a tool that allows you to jump in every time and just write some code to a tool that only allows you to prompt is an uneasy one. Breaking old habits takes some time, really, and it seems that nowadays, time moves pretty fast.
Anyway, if you’ve never tried to use one of those tools, I would highly recommend giving it a go for a week. Those that I know of are:
I use Conductor mostly right now, but looking at emdash, I feel like they made some right choices. Being able to use any harness seems useful, especially since this kind of programming being feasible for a lot of people depends on current, somewhat subsidized subscriptions such as Claude Max or ChatGPT Plus.
But even when I use those tools, I feel like here and there I want to be able to look at code, traverse it, search and understand. I don’t feel like having AI fully autonomous right now is a good choice, especially since computers cannot be held responsible.
