> “You only think you understand how a bicycle works, until you learn to ride one.”
This resonates deeply with me. That's why I built one myself [0], I really really love to truly understand how coding agents work. The learning has been immense for me, I now have working knowledge of ANSI escape codes, grapheme clusters, terminal emulators, Unicode normalization, VT protocols, PTY sessions, and filesystem operations - all the low-level details I would have never think about until I were implementing them.
It's conflating two issues though. Most people who can ride a bike can't explain the physics. They really don't know how it works. The bicycle lesson is about training the brain on a new task that cannot be taught in any other way.
This case is more like a journeyman blacksmith who has to make his own tools before he can continue. In doing so, he gets tools of his own, but the real reward was learning what is required to handle the metal such that it makes a strong hammer. And like the blacksmith, you learn more if you use an existing agent to write your agent.
Agree, to me, the wheel is the greatest invention of all. Everyone could have rode a bike, but the underlying physic and motion that came to `riding` is a whole another story.
This resonates deeply with me. That's why I built one myself [0], I really really love to truly understand how coding agents work. The learning has been immense for me, I now have working knowledge of ANSI escape codes, grapheme clusters, terminal emulators, Unicode normalization, VT protocols, PTY sessions, and filesystem operations - all the low-level details I would have never think about until I were implementing them.
[0] https://github.com/vinhnx/vtcode