What does it take to stop babysitting your coding agents? Ajay and Andrew open with how big-tech office politics quietly manage people out, then get into the real news: Luxwander finally has a true progress number (95%), and the workflow that made it measurable has been split out into Rigr — a spec-first system with assurance tiers that let you dial expected quality from NASA-grade down to digital handyman. Along the way: a Minecraft server with a physical gold economy, why front-loading specifications kills a hundred rounds of code review, parallel CI as the new agentic bottleneck, the multi-repo versus monorepo argument, and a closing debate on whether today's models are intelligent or just acting.

In this episode:

How people get managed out, and what an IC can move without authority

Luxwander at 95 percent, and what a real progress bar took

Minecraft Nations: guilds, territory, and a physical in-game gold economy

Assurance tiers: matching AI effort and cost to the stakes of the job

Rigr: specs, slices, and contracts before a line of code is written

Parallel CI, multi-repo orchestration, and the monorepo debate

Are we the intelligent ones, or is the AI acting?

Chapters:

(00:00:00) - Teaser: launch a rocket on tier five

(00:00:18) - Office politics and how people get managed out

(00:06:37) - What an IC can actually move without authority

(00:07:42) - Luxwander at 95%: finally a real progress number

(00:10:36) - From "just build it" to eighteen modules

(00:11:52) - Minecraft Nations: guilds, territory, a physical gold economy

(00:19:28) - Assurance tiers: NASA at one, digital handyman at five

(00:25:39) - Why Rigr got split out of Luxwander

(00:31:39) - Zooming out to an orchestration layer over the agents

(00:38:30) - Front-loading specs to kill a hundred rounds of review

(00:40:55) - Modules, slices, contracts, and isolation

(00:51:16) - Parallel CI becomes the agentic bottleneck

(01:00:25) - Multi-repo orchestration and the monorepo argument

(01:06:23) - Opinionated defaults, and why design stays human

(01:08:43) - Tier thought experiments: rockets and cancer screening

(01:10:58) - Are we the intelligent ones?