Erik Onarheim
Software developer in Minneapolis who created Excalibur, an open source game engine for the web.
“Using an agent basically freezes your ability as an engineer at that point, because you can only direct it at your current ability, and then potentially you atrophy from there. So it's important, I think, to keep sharp.”
TypeScript.fm - The Friendly Show for TypeScript Developers · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026
Context
The hosts had just praised a young developer who spent 950 days building a JavaScript engine by hand. Onarheim takes a quick tangent to warn that leaning on agents caps an engineer's growth.
Transcript
Yeah. Learning does require mental friction. If it's easy, you're not learning.
Exactly. That's just
not, that's just not how human brains work. And I've talked about this. Okay, if you'll indulge the tangent here real quick, I've talked about with you at this offline is using an agent basically freezes your ability as an engineer at that point because you can only direct it at your current ability and then potentially you atrophy from there. Yes. So like it's important, I think, to keep sharp.
Yeah, keep like keep a mix, you know? And like, and I think, well, let's save it for the Minnesota long goodbye. We could talk a little bit more about that because I do have something related to talk about at the end. But we're not, we're not done with JS Engine. There's more. We're not.
There's more. You're of the JS Engine, JavaScript runtime. Another one, Boomcat, is a tiny JS Engine with ES2026 and native TypeScript and JSX support. This is built in C3, which is a language I'm not really familiar with, but it's what it's called on the tagline. It says small enough to hide, fast…
With a sweet, sweet logo.
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