I don’t write most of my code anymore. I write the spec, agents write the code, and I own the review.

That changes what you need from your tools. So I built a new workbench for it. It is called cicoria, and it is out today.

From code-centric to agent-centric

For years we were used to working around code. The editor sat at the center, and everything else (the terminal, git, the review) was arranged around it, because the work was typing code into files.

Most of the work that needs a durable engine is not glamorous. It is an expense waiting for a signature. A job that fails at 3 a.m. because a network cable sneezed. An order message that arrives twice. A batch whose size you only know when it starts.

These are the problems I had in mind while building Packtrail. Here are six ordinary workflows, each based on a runnable example in the repository, and what Packtrail does with them.

When I first wrote about Packtrail, the pitch was a single sentence: a durable workflow engine that needs nothing but NATS. No database, no coordinator, no second thing to keep alive.

Today that sentence gets a version number. Packtrail 1.0.0 is out.

The second time around

Here is the part I don’t usually put in a release post: version 1.0.0 is not the first draft with a nicer tag. It is the second attempt.

A single LLM answer has a neat, confident shape. Public opinion does not.

When a policy changes, a product launches, or a company announces something unpopular, the interesting part is rarely the first reaction. It is what happens after people see each other reacting. Arguments harden. Coalitions form. A practical objection becomes the sentence everyone repeats. A weak point disappears because nobody picks it up.

That is hard to study with one prompt.

After a long string of 0.0.x releases, Phero finally reaches v1.0.0.

We made it to 1.0.0

There’s a particular feeling that comes with cutting a 1.0.0 tag. The 0.0.x versions are a workshop: you tear walls down, you move the staircase, you sleep on it and rebuild it the next morning. 1.0.0 is the moment you finally open the door and say: this is ready, and I stand behind it.

Now that anyone can build the prototype, the rarest skill is knowing which prototypes deserve to live.

In two previous articles I argued that AI does the easy 20% of software, writing code, and leaves the hard 80% untouched. The first traced the pattern back forty years, the second catalogued the 80% in nine parts a demo never shows. Both pieces did the same thing: they pointed a finger. At the PM who builds something in an afternoon and declares engineering obsolete. At the leap from “it works in the demo” to “we don’t need them anymore.”