From IDEs to AI Agents with Steve Yegge

From IDEs to AI Agents with Steve Yegge

From The Pragmatic Engineer by Gergely Orosz

March 11, 2026 · 1h 31m

About this episode

Steve Yegge discusses the impact of AI on engineering work and the future of coding.

Brought to You By: • Statsig — ⁠ The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. • Sonar – The makers of SonarQube, the industry standard for automated code review • WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. — Steve Yegge has spent decades writing software and thinking about how the craft evolves. From his early years at Amazon and Google, to his influential blog posts, he has often been early at spotting shifts in how software gets built. In this episode of Pragmatic Engineer , I talk with Steve about how AI is changing engineering work, why he believes coding by hand may gradually disappear, and what developers should focus on, instead. We discuss his latest book, Vibe Coding , and the open-source AI agent orchestrator he built called Gas Town, which he said most devs should avoid using. Steve shares his framework for levels of AI adoption by engineers, ranging from avoiding AI tools entirely, to running multiple agents in parallel. We discuss why he believes the knowledge that engineers need to know keeps changing, and why understanding how systems evolve may matter more than mastering any particular tool. We also explore broader…

People in this episode

Host: Gergely Orosz

Guest: Steve Yegge

Topics covered

  • AI in engineering
  • software development
  • coding evolution
  • technical debt
  • productivity challenges

Keywords

  • AI agents
  • software engineering
  • coding by hand
  • technical debt
  • productivity

Sponsors

Statsig, Sonar, WorkOS

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Amazon, Google

Products: Vibe Coding, Gas Town

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