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MA Marco Arment Software developer and podcaster, creator of the podcast app Overcast and the earlier read-later app Instapaper.

“Now, when you're doing a lot of agentic work, you are being held back by the build speed a lot. You're being held back by simulator speed a lot, and the simulators have gotten so slow. I have been waiting on my laptop so much these last few months as I've done more agentic coding, which is the opposite of what I would expect, but that's how it is. Because in the background, Claude's like cranking away, like testing out different things, building test suites, running test suites.”

Accidental Tech Podcast · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026

“Now, when you're doing a lot of agentic work, you are being held back by the build speed a lot. You're being held back by simulator speed a lot, and the simulators have gotten so slow. I have been waiting on my laptop so much these last few months as I've done more agentic coding, which is the opposite of what I would expect, but that's how it is. Because in the background, Claude's like cranking away, like testing out different things, building test suites, running test suites.” — Marco Arment, Accidental Tech Podcast

Context

Arment was explaining why he ordered a new maxed-out MacBook Pro to replace two machines. His point is that AI coding agents running in the background make local build and test speed matter more than when he typed all the code himself.

Transcript

Accidental Tech Podcast Around 2:14:03 into the episode
Marco Arment

It's very nice. So what I've been doing a lot recently, the number of times that I am away from home has just gone up in the last couple of years. I'm bouncing back and forth a lot more between the beach. I'm doing a lot more stuff, going back and forth with the city. Oh,

John Siracusa

he got two of them.

Marco Arment

And the other thing that's changed massively in the last six months is I'm doing a huge amount more agentic software development. And what that, so what I've had is desktop laptop and laptop laptop. Desktop laptop is the M3 Max, all decked out. I've used it as a desktop. It stays at my house most of the time. If I go to the beach for the summer, I'll bring it. But for the most part, I'm traveling with the smaller one when I'm just going somewhere for a day or a weekend or something. I'm bringing a smaller one. And I've liked having two different computers in a lot of ways. Casey Liss, you know, like I'd run the beta on the small one, but not the big one and stuff like that. Like I would, I would treat them differently. But one thing that's getting increasingly high of a pain in the butt is trying to coordinate clawed code between the two and trying to coordinate any kind of AI project and options. Operation between the two because these things just don't share well. And also, because like when I when I first got the travel one, the M4, the base model M4 14-inch, I wasn't writing that much code like on the train and on the ferry. But when I would, I'm like, well, there's only so fast I can type, and I'm not going to be held back that much by the build speed of…

Casey Liss

This is the way.

Marco Arment

And, you know, and look, this stuff is changing a lot. So it's possible in six months I might say that's no longer the right move. I don't know. Probably not, but who knows? But it is getting increasingly obvious to me that the best way for my current computing needs to continue is to have one…

John Siracusa

you going to trade in the 16-inch, sell it? Or is someone in your house going to use it? Where has that gone?

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

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