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EB Erik Bernhardsson Erik Bernhardsson On Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron

“I feel like in a way, because of the training data and the training loops, there's more incumbency power. There's more staying power in software today. If you get inside the training data and you get the models to recommend a certain framework, I've heard people say, oh, I'm just going to use React for everything because agents are really good at it. I'm not going to try these new fancy front-end frameworks.”

Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron · AI Builders · October 2026

“I feel like in a way, because of the training data and the training loops, there's more incumbency power. There's more staying power in software today. If you get inside the training data and you get the models to recommend a certain framework, I've heard people say, oh, I'm just going to use React for everything because agents are really good at it. I'm not going to try these new fancy front-end frameworks.” — Erik Bernhardsson, Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron

Context

Bernhardsson says Modal now tracks which tools coding agents recommend, much like search engine optimization. Old code in training data also makes deprecating features harder, because agents keep generating code that uses them.

Transcript

Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron Around 26:33 into the episode
Erik Bernhardsson

…like we've necessarily yet run up against the foundational limits. But I mean, Anthropic, like, you know, a couple of days ago, they announced they're moving off Git, I believe, or at least GitHub. We might run up against those limits at some point when we have 10x the amount of commits every day.

Jacob Effron

…right? From a developer to agents themselves, right? And I'm curious, like, how you think about what that means for modal as a business and some of the decisions you might make differently as more and more of folks interacting with modal are either doing it via agent or purely end-to-end agent.

Erik Bernhardsson

It's actually changed like a lot less than I think I would have expected. It turns out agents, I mean, like in the early days, we built modal in order to give engineers a better developer experience and the ability to move faster. It turns out like agents kind of want the same thing. They want fast feedback loop. They want good error messages, good documentation, a lot of the stuff like that that engineers want too. So most of the stuff is actually quite similar. I do think it's like certain things a little bit harder. One of the things we found, for instance, like deprecations is much more annoying because agents are trained often on a lot of old code that exists online. So removing features is much harder for us. We can't just rely on remove it from the documentation and wait three months because it's in the training data. People will use LMs to generate modal code. And that will be using deprecated features. And that's quite hard to change. So we've had to change our deprecation window quite a lot. Another thing we've started doing quite a lot is also setting up a lot of automated pipelines to basically have LMs continuously write modal code and making sure it compiles and not compiles…

Jacob Effron

One thing I'm struck by is you obviously had this very Prussian bet in 2023 on sandboxes, right? It sounds like you guys had kind of this instinct of like, hey, this is going to be something that's required for coding agents. And then, you know, it took a few years for it to really take off. And…

Patrick Chase

Jacob, are you fishing for the next thing we should be investing in?

Jacob Effron

100%. 100%. I'm nothing if not shameless.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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