Software Development on Paul Payne

Design Intelligence

paul@payne.io (Paul Payne) — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A lot of my recent thoughts about coding with agents lately (like this, and this, and this) have been circling a specific topic… design.

Coding agents are now good enough to replace all of my manual coding tasks, I haven’t written code myself for months (and it’s not because I don’t know how), but we’re still figuring out how to make them better at the more “senior” software development tasks.

Developers in the Age of Agent Fleets

paul@payne.io (Paul Payne) — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Don’t distract the engineers
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In January, I wrote about how best-practices make software development agents work better. Now, six weeks later, we’re in a position where we’re not just talking about individual developers with a coding agent, but teams of developers with fleets of agents. So, it’s time to update my thinking.

Context is King

paul@payne.io (Paul Payne) — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We saw a massive sell-off of software stocks last week, partially in response to Anthropic’s claim that 100% of their code is now written by AI and the release of a couple of new products for lawyers and office workers.

I’ve been doing this for a few years now, so let me provide you with a bit of insight into how this actually works.

Vibe Coding

paul@payne.io (Paul Payne) — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a charged debate happening right now about whether or not coding agents are worth a damn.

I’m going on the record and saying, yes, yes they are.

There are some people who just tried coding assistants at various stages of development and didn’t like their output.

I hear often is that AI code is slop; AI can’t produce anything beyond toy software; that when you reach a certain level of complexity, the assistant and the code base just falls apart. I still run into this, but vastly further down the line than I did even six months ago. There’s a whole host of things you can do to make coding assistants get further along:

My Programming Career is a Historical Artifact

paul@payne.io (Paul Payne) — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m calling it. My entire 30 year career in technology is a historical artifact. My current work with AI has convinced me that, in a few short years, humanity will look back and think how funny it was that people once actually programmed machines.