How to build a coding agent
SMRTR summary
A mere 300 lines of code separating you from building your own AI coding agent. That's the message Geoffrey Huntley, formerly of Canva and now an engineer at Sourcegraph, wants developers to understand as he pulls back the curtain on what he calls "the loop."
"With LLM tokens, that's all it is. 300 lines of code running in a loop with LLM tokens. You just keep throwing tokens at the loop, and then you've got yourself an agent," explains Huntley.
As 2025 approaches, Huntley argues that understanding how to build coding agents has become as fundamental as knowing what a primary key is in database design. Those who master this skill transform from AI consumers to producers capable of automation.
The workshop reveals essential concepts: choosing the right agentic model (like Claude Sonnet or Kimi K2), clearing context windows between tasks, and being judicious with memory allocation.
For developers still skeptical about AI's impact, Huntley offers a stark warning – while some remain stuck questioning AI's legitimacy, others are already "completely automating their job function" on the other side of what he calls "the cliff."
SMRTR provides this summary for quick context. The original article belongs to Hacker News.
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