The headline this week belongs to Gergely Orosz, who asks the uncomfortable question: are AI agents actually slowing us down? The answer — more bugs, more outages, slower shipping velocity — comes with a clear diagnosis and a framework for what teams need to do differently.
Matteo Collina sees software engineering fracturing into three distinct roles as AI shifts the bottleneck from writing code to exercising judgment — time to figure out which lane you're in. Addy Osmani names the invisible tax every team shipping AI-generated code is already paying: comprehension debt — the widening gap between code that ships and code anyone can actually understand. And Apen Warr makes the provocative case that every extra approval gate compounds into a 10× velocity drag, quietly killing the teams that rely on them.
Over at Factory, they made a clean break: useEffect is banned. Entirely. The reasoning is compelling enough to make every React developer reconsider their defaults.
On the tools front: snipgrapher turns any code file into a shareable, syntax-highlighted image with one CLI call — another gem from Matteo Collina. Vercel open-sourced OpenReview, a self-hosted AI code review bot for teams that prefer not routing their entire codebase through someone else's SaaS. Starwind UI brings the shadcn/ui install-and-own philosophy to Astro with 45+ animated, accessible components. ZeroBoot delivers sub-millisecond VM sandboxes for AI agents via copy-on-write forking — the isolation primitive the agentic era was missing. And the Machine Payments Protocol quietly embeds agent-to-agent billing directly into the HTTP call, possibly laying the financial plumbing for the entire AI agent economy.
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Find the 10 highlighted links of weeklyfoo #129:
Are AI agents actually slowing us down?
by Gergely Orosz
As more software engineers use AI agents daily, there's also more sloppy software, outages, quality issues, and even a slowdown in shipping velocity. What's happening, and how do we solve it?
🚀 Read it!, ai, engineering
Software Engineering Splits in Three
by Matteo Collina
AI-assisted coding changes the game for enterprises by shifting the bottleneck from coding to judgment, impacting software builds and roles.
📰 Good to know, ai, engineering
Every layer of review makes you 10x slower
by Apen Warr
We’ve all heard of those network effect laws - the value of a network goes up with the square of the number of members.
📰 Good to know, ai, reviews
Why we banned React's useEffect
by Alvin Sng
At Factory, we have a simple, yet important frontend rule - no useEffect.
📰 Good to know, react, use-effect
by Addy Osmany
The hidden cost of AI generated code.
📰 Good to know, ai, engineering
by Matteo Collina
CLI to generate image snippets from code files, stdin, or inline source. Uses Shiki-based syntax highlighting with a built-in fallback tokenizer.
🧰 Tools, cli, code, images
by openreview.labs.vercel.dev
An open-source, self-hosted AI code review bot powered by Vercel.
🧰 Tools, ai, reviews
by starwind.dev
shadcn/ui for Astro. 45+ animated and accessible components. Install via CLI. Own the code.
🧰 Tools, ui, astro
by zeroboot
Sub-millisecond VM sandboxes for AI agents via copy-on-write forking
🧰 Tools, rust, vms
by mpp.dev
The open protocol for machine-to-machine payments. Charge for API requests, tool calls, or content—agents and apps pay per request in the same HTTP call.
🧰 Tools, payments
Want to read more? Check out the full article here.
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