ABOUT THIS EPISODE
🎥 Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Kas27lxen4
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🎙️ About this episode with Lars Faye
Lars Faye is a self taught developer with about fifteen years in the trenches, co founder of Chee Studio in Buffalo, and the guy who wrote "Agentic Coding is a Trap." That article hit the front page of Hacker News, got read on air by Theo (t3.gg), and got covered by Cal Newport. He and I actually met arguing about this stuff in the comments on LinkedIn, so this conversation is the long version of that argument.
We trace his whole path first: five years old on an MS DOS prompt, a computer repair job he hated, his wife telling him he could just do it himself, first client websites in 2008 right as the economy collapsed, then going all in on agency work.
Then we get into it. Lars is not anti AI. He uses agents every day and says every developer alive wants to type less. His argument is that there is no free lunch, that the tools which make you fast are the same tools that quietly stop you from learning, and that only a sharp developer can catch what a model gets wrong. We cover why he thinks the real problem is composition rather than code quality, what he means when he says the agents start to own you, why pointing an LLM at your own back catalog makes you stagnant, and the part I did not expect, which is that he thinks LLMs are going to cause the biggest surge of real programmers in history.
I pushed back on a lot of this. He pushed back on me. If you are a builder trying to figure out how hard to lean into agents without hollowing yourself out, this is the conversation.
Read the article: https://larsfaye.com/articles/agentic-coding-is-a-trap
🔗 Connect with Lars Faye
Website: https://larsfaye.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@larsfayedev
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/larsfaye/
Company: Chee Studio https://cheewebdevelopment.com
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Website: https://markszymanski.co
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🎧 About this show
Fueled By Progress is a long-form conversation series with builders, operators, and thinkers exploring business, technology, and what it actually takes to build a meaningful life in a modern world.
If you're new here, welcome. If you've been here since episodes recorded in my car, thank you. We're still just getting warmed up 💪
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⏱️ Chapters
00:00 Cold open
00:40 Intro
05:56 Meet Lars Faye
06:25 The article that went viral, and Theo reading it on air
07:42 Where "agentic coding is a trap" actually came from
16:14 You need a job to get expertise and expertise to get a job
23:08 Self taught from MS DOS, computer repair, and going solo
26:14 First websites in 2008, then going all in on agencies
36:05 Right tool for the job, and the sites nobody ever touches
37:57 Why developers get ossified in one stack
45:14 Writing custom blocks, and learning to love Gutenberg
47:25 Building brand guardrails clients can't break
52:27 Two ways into business, and the e myth trap
55:57 I don't sell a tech solution, I sell the collaboration
59:16 Enter AI
1:01:09 Every developer wants to type less
1:06:19 Cursor, OpenCode, and moving to Chinese models
1:10:20 The three ways people actually use AI
1:14:56 Why he won't hook an agent up to his Gmail
1:16:25 Would he let an agent build the whole site?
1:23:23 Code quality is fine, composition is the problem
1:24:22 At that point, the agents own you
1:27:55 Point an LLM at your old work and you go stagnant
1:31:51 There's no such thing as a free lunch
1:34:13 What happens to a generation missing expertise
1:39:46 You can't learn to cook by watching
1:40:49 Why a surge of real programmers is coming
1:44:33 The steelman, the personal computer and the secretary
1:47:21 Why he's long term optimistic
1:51:29 We're arguing in front of the 0.01%
1:53:26 Have LLMs already plateaued?
1:56:00 Where to find Lars
📃 Ethics Statement: https://markszymanski.co/policies/ethics-statement/
