Fragmented - AI Developer Podcast
Fragmented - AI Developer Podcast

301 - The AI coding ladder

19 January 2026 24:38 Donn Felker, Kaushik Gopal

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About this episode

Most folks reference "AI coding" like it's one thing. It's really not. In this foundational episode Kaushik & Iury walk through (at least) four paradigms — from super autocomplete to agent orchestration — each with different workflows, expectations, and mental models.

What do most developers follow today? Where is the frontier? What's coming in the future?

Listen to the episode and find out!

Full shownotes at fragmentedpodcast.com.

Show Notes

Gen 1: Super autocomplete

  • Intellisense - regular autocomplete
  • Github Copilot
  • Cursor Tab

Gen 2: Chat Oriented Programming

  • Cursor IDE
  • Firebender

Gen 3: Agent

  • Nvidia's definition of an Agent
  • ReAct Prompting
  • Chain of Thought was a prompting hack
  • DeepSeek
    • DeepSeek - R1 paper
  • TUI tools (or Harnesses):
    • Claude Code
    • Open Code
    • Codex Cli
    • Gemini Cli
  • IDE >
  • Cursor Agent
  • Copilot (MS)
  • Junie - Intellij
  • Antigravity - Google
  • Headless Tools:
    • Jules - Google
    • Claude Code on the Web
    • Codex Web
  • Gen 4: Agent Orchestration

    • Git worktrees

    Tips

    • Iury: Transfer between agents using your own
      compact command
    • KG: Ask the agent to clarify your prompt

    Confirm if my requirements are clear. If you have follow up questions, ask me
    first and clarify before executing anything.

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