Does Anyone Still Remember How to Code?

wyr95626@gmail.com (Leafw) — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a trending post on X today:

does anyone remember how to code

The post comes from Nikita Bier. It has racked up tens of thousands of likes and sparked a lot of discussion among developers.

What I find interesting about this line is that, as a joke, it points to a real tension in how AI Coding is developing:

Do More Sub-Agents Make Better Code?

wyr95626@gmail.com (Leafw) — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Many agent products now let a main agent spin up a batch of sub-agents to work in parallel. But how well does multi-agent collaboration actually work, and is it always better than a single agent? Few people bother to compare.

I recently read a paper that does exactly that: When Sub-Agents Work in Parallel: The Promises and Pitfalls of Dynamic Concurrency in Long-Horizon Coding Tasks, https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10263 . The work comes from Nanjing University, Central University of Finance and Economics, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, by Han Li, HanHaoNing Li, Ziqian Jiang, and Yiling Lou. They turned the built-in sub-agent concurrency of three coding agents, Codex, Claude Code, and Kimi Code, on and off, and ran each setting on 354 tasks: 2,124 runs in total, with 11.2 billion tokens logged, which comes to $20,780.02 at standard API prices.

Coding Agent on Leafw's Blog

Does Anyone Still Remember How to Code?

Do More Sub-Agents Make Better Code?