Thorsten Ball: the agent game changed three times this year — orbs, irrefutable proof, full SDLC

Thorsten Ball's newsletter on how everyone now lives on a different timeline: some conclude agents can't write code having spent under 100k tokens, others burn billions a week and say agents beat humans at software. "The future is already here — it's just not evenly distributed."

Three practices that changed the game at Amp this year:

Going all-in on remote development with orbs — fundamental enough to question the role of the OS and what software even is.
Asking agents for "irrefutable proof" — made him reconsider tests, code review, and specs. "If there's a 10x game changer, it's this one."
Letting agents control the full SDLC: shipping to production, monitoring rollouts, reading logs, toggling feature flags, sending emails, granting credits, investigating DB issues — everything except writing to the database. "The models have become too good to keep them boxed in as smart typewriters."

Contrast with companies stuck waiting on PR approvals, teams skeptical of AI, or a $50/week model budget. Also recommended: Andy Matuschak's "Why books don't work," Aaron Francis' "Caring in the age of AI" ("Your job is to eat the pain"), Namespace's macOS cloud architecture piece, and more.

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Thorsten Ball: the agent game changed three times this year — orbs, irrefutable proof, full SDLC

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