On Agentic Tools and Lock-in

4 May 26

ai

I read Lars Faye’s Agentic Coding is a Trap post this morning. It engages with what I think is the core question around agentic software development, and especially with how we teach others (and juniors) to do it effectively. My paraphrase:

how necessary is the struggle of implementation in delivering good software?

Honestly, I don’t think anyone has a precise handle on the answer. My gut feel is that it’s somewhat necessary, in the same way that I’m still teaching my kids arithmetic even though we have ubiquitous calculating devices. But I also think that some of the four-Yorkshiremen-style “in my day we walked 15 miles in the snow, uphill both ways” stuff I read is probably a little overblown. Although my feeling there is no less based on vibes and experience than the claim itself.

I do think it’s worth making one other point about the Vendor Lock-In section of the article. Of all the software tools and techniques I’ve invested significant time in over my 20-year career as a researcher and developer, LLMs have some of the lowest lock-in I’ve ever encountered. Seriously, I was more locked in to Emacs¹ than I am to Claude (even though I’m quite happy with Claude at the moment). All the tooling I’ve built is just md files with human-readable instructions in them, and switching to a different coding harness is, in general, just a file rename away (mv CLAUDE.md AGENTS.md).

So while it’s a pain when Claude has an outage, if they were really not working for me I’d let my monthly subscription lapse, and I reckon I’d be just as productive with a new platform within about one hour (partially because the new provider’s model would help with the migration).

It’s not to say that I don’t read and nod along with Lars’s post. I do, if for no other reason than that I grieve the loss of the feeling of mastery that comes with being a code-slinging wizard (something I’m now realising was at least a little load-bearing for my work identity). But in the scheme of tech and software dev, LLMs are the first thing in perhaps my whole career that I think might actually live up to the hype. They also have the least lock-in of anything I’ve used (cf Google’s famous we have no moat and neither does anyone else post). And that makes me a little less nervous about diving in.

@online{swift2026onAgenticToolsAndLockIn,
  author = {Ben Swift},
  title = {On Agentic Tools and Lock-in},
  url = {https://benswift.me/blog/2026/05/04/on-agentic-tools-and-lock-in/},
  year = {2026},
  month = {05},
  note = {AT-URI: at://did:plc:tevykrhi4kibtsipzci76d76/site.standard.document/2026-05-04-on-agentic-tools-and-lock-in},
}