News on Jake Quist

IDEs Are for Micromanagers

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Six months ago, if you’d asked me whether a terminal-based coding tool could compete with a full IDE, I would have chortled into my coffee. Six months ago, Cursor (and friends) had it all: slick interfaces, deep integrations, and massive funding. Claude Code was just a TUI. It felt like Anthropic wasn’t being serious about the space and threw a half-baked product into the wild.

Now Is a Great Time to Be a People-Oriented Engineer

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Right now I’m running four instances of Claude Code on different projects, one instance of Codex, and one of Gemini. Two of the projects are serious. The rest are toy apps I may never ship. I glance at each one every few minutes, approve a change, redirect an approach, catch a hallucination. It feels like spinning plates.

It also feels familiar. This is what happened when processors went from single-core to multi-core. The individual cores were actually slower than the single-core chips they replaced. Measured in isolation, it was a downgrade. But it didn’t matter, because you could run things in parallel, and the aggregate throughput was so much higher that it felt like magic.

What Happens To Developer Tools After Claude Code?

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re building a developer tool right now, you probably have a launch plan: Post it on Show HN. Grind for GitHub stars. Maybe host a hackathon or two. You know, the standard playbook.

I suspect this playbook will soon become obsolete. Not because it doesn’t work on humans, but because humans are no longer the ones choosing the tools.

It’s not that humans have left the loop. A human still decides which tools end up in a project. But increasingly, that decision gets mediated by an AI coding agent.

What Happens When AI Can Write All Your Software?

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, while refactoring some of my old code, I asked an LLM to write a RingBuffer implementation in TypeScript. I’ve written these before in other languages. I know the tricky edge cases, especially around concurrency. To my surprise — and mild horror — the LLM wrote it flawlessly. Better than I could have. No feedback necessary. No vibing at all.

Then I asked it to build something slightly more ambitious: a personal CRM.

Big Tech vs. OpenClaw

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

OpenClaw launched last week. If you haven’t tried it yet, it’s essentially a way for AI to control your computer on your behalf. You describe what you want done, and it does it—clicking, typing, navigating, the whole thing.

It’s impressive technology. But the most interesting thing about OpenClaw isn’t what it can do. It’s what it means for the companies that have spent the last fifteen years figuring out how to capture and hold our attention.

OpenClaw is What Apple Intelligence Should Have Been

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Something strange is happening with Mac Minis. They’re selling out everywhere, and it’s not because people suddenly need more coffee table computers.

If you browse Reddit or HN, you’ll see the same pattern: people are buying Mac Minis specifically to run AI agents with computer use. They’re setting up headless machines whose sole job is to automate their workflows. OpenClaw—the open-source framework that lets you run Claude, GPT-5, or whatever model you want to actually control your computer—has become the killer app for Mac hardware. Not Final Cut. Not Logic. An AI agent that clicks buttons.