Nathaniel Whittemore

Today we are doing a little bit of a catch-up on the terms that you might have heard in passing, especially if you've been anywhere near AI Twitter slash X over the past couple of weeks.

There are a few things that might sound like absolute Greek to you, but which combined tell the story of how vibe coding, which I really mean AI and agentic coding, are evolving early into this year.

Entrepreneur and content creator Riley Brown recently tweeted, Now, if you are thinking, I don't know what any of those things mean, don't worry, you are not alone, and we're going to get into much of it today.

The context of all of this is the big shift in perception over the last couple of weeks, which has been pretty well chronicled in episodes throughout this month.

It wasn't that we got a new model or anything like that.

It's that everyone went home for the holidays, had just a little bit of downtime to start playing around, started working on some personal or professional projects with Opus 4.5 or Clawed Code or 5.2 Codex or some combination thereof, and realized that what we could do with agentic coding was much, much farther than they might have thought.

This was reinforced a couple weeks later when Anthropic dropped Clawed Cowork, which is sort of like Clawed Code for the rest of us, and revealed that it had been written 100% by Clawed Code in just about 10 days.

Now, if you want even more of a primer, I'd suggest one of my previous episodes, Why Everybody is Obsessed with Cloud Code, Cloud Cowork is Cloud Code for Everybody Else, or most recently and probably most importantly, Why Code AGI is Functional AGI and It's Here.

So that's the setup, and we just keep getting evidence of how much things have shifted.

Cursor CEO Michael Truel posted about a week and a half ago, We built a browser with GPT-5.2 in Cursor.

It ran uninterrupted for one week.

It's 3 million plus lines of code across thousands of files.

The rendering engine is from scratch in Rust with HTML parsing, CSS cascade, layout, text shaping, paint, and a custom JSVM.

It kind of works.

It still has issues and is of course very far from WebKit and Chromium Parity, but we were astonished that simple websites render quickly and largely correctly.

And to be clear, this was an experiment in autonomy.

While at first blush people thought it was one agent writing 3 million lines of code, it wasn't.

It was actually hundreds of concurrent agents.

Cursor wrote it up in a blog post called Scaling Long-Running Autonomous Coding.

And it's very clear that Cursor is interested in pushing this frontier.