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TS Tarun Sachdeva On devtools.fm: Developer Tools, Open Source, Software Development

“Every single time they use these agents, this is not just a log of your computer's activity. This is decision data. This is your decisions, your team's decisions. And that level of fidelity into those decisions should benefit the teams whose data it is, not just the model providers that are providing the models.”

devtools.fm: Developer Tools, Open Source, Software Development · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026

“Every single time they use these agents, this is not just a log of your computer's activity. This is decision data. This is your decisions, your team's decisions. And that level of fidelity into those decisions should benefit the teams whose data it is, not just the model providers that are providing the models.” — Tarun Sachdeva, devtools.fm: Developer Tools, Open Source, Software Development

Context

After a host said that seeing a month-long AI conversation would be valuable well beyond coding, Tarun argues that agents are becoming the interface for all knowledge work, and asks who should own and benefit from the record of those sessions.

Transcript

devtools.fm: Developer Tools, Open Source, Software Development Around 41:26 into the episode
Tarun Sachdeva

…be, there's, there, there's so much nuance to these things. And you kind of have to, you have to like think of a task as not just a singular, like, I did this, I pushed this much code, this is how much it costs. It's like, there's a lot more in the middle there that you, you, you have to consider.

Andrew Lisowski

Yeah, just on time savings alone. Like if I prompted $400 away, but I saved three months of my own life like going down different paths and finding like the dead ends. Like it's kind of hard to quantify that upfront. There's a lot of, yeah.

Tarun Sachdeva

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. This is also why we. We intentionally chose to not surface token counts in the product as a default thing, right? Like tokens are not something we are overly fixated on as a product. We are very much of like a tool to help developers collaborate with each other in this new way. And I just find that like token counts are useful in some sense, but like it's so different in every harness and every model. It's just like, how useful is that number really? Is like attaching the number of bytes your code base like consumes. It's like, okay, cool, useful in some contexts, but for the most part, it's just not useful for workflow.

Andrew Lisowski

Yeah. Recently, Dan Abramov, a famous React guy, took a detour for a month to go into mathematics and prove like theorems and stuff. And talking about this makes me think that that type of work really fits to this model too, because he spent a month prompting LLMs and probing the depths of them and…

Tarun Sachdeva

Yeah, exactly. And those conversations are some of the most interesting. You know, we have some really interesting ones on our that are shared publicly as well. And I think that, you know, your point here is exactly very astute is that agents are the primary interface to really all knowledge work.…

Justin Bennett

There's something that I would, I'd love to sort of like chat through. As you were talking about like thinking of like these certain features as like a call center or something, there's like, you know, classic examples of like engineering orgs getting treated as call centers and that like really…

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

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