Armin Ronacher (creator of Flask, previously Sentry’s VP of Platform, and currently founder of a startup Earendil) shares his experience building a startup where 90% of the code is AI-generated. We discuss which programming languages work best with AI agents, why Python's ecosystem makes life harder for AI, and what skills programmers need to stay relevant in the age of AI.

Outline

00:00 Episode highlights and introduction

0:43 - How much code do you write yourself vs AI agents?

2:03 - What kind of problems are suitable for AI and what do you solve yourself?

4:02 - Why do AI agents work better with certain languages like Go vs Python?

7:15 - How to steer AI agents in certain directions?

12:01 - What patterns can AI agents handle well?

15:28 - When starting a new project, what language do you use now?

16:27 - Do you monitor agents and what safeguards do you have?

18:48 - How do you handle parallelization with multiple agents?

19:34 - How should we handle licenses for AI-generated open source libraries?

24:07 - What is the future of programming jobs?

26:31 - What skills should programmers learn to stay competitive?

31:05 - Tips on how to get started with AI agents?

33:44 - How to stay up to date with all the recent changes?

36:16 - Where can people find you online?

Episode links

– Claude Code: https://claude.ai/

– UV (Python package manager): https://github.com/astral-sh/uv

– Simon Willison's blog: https://simonwillison.net/

– Armin's blog: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/