A Year of Agents: Armin Ronacher on Psychosis, Friction, and Staying in the Loop
Flask and Jinja2 creator Armin Ronacher spent a year building and using AI agents, and this CodeCrafts 2026 talk is the unvarnished version: no hype, hard lessons. The thread that ties it together — 'agent psychosis' — is what happens when output scales faster than understanding: random GitHub PRs changing 664,000 lines, core infrastructure no human understands, juniors arguing with Claude to convince their seniors, and a senior who has to 'ask his machine' how his own system works. His argument: agency must rest with the human, code is the only thing agents actually execute, and 'without friction, you can't steer' — so the real engineering problem is separating the bad friction (repro cases) from the good (review call-outs, SLOs, sandboxes like his open-source Gondolin).
