Is your repo agent ready? - Ben's Bites
Using coding agents, if you're not technical
Is your repo agent ready?
Jan 22, 2026
The newsletter for the technically curious. Updates, tool reviews, and lay of the land from an exited founder turned investor and forever tinkerer.
Hey folks,
I just wrote a comprehensive guide onwhat you need to know to use coding agents if you’re not that technical. Explaining everything from terms like local and remote, to actually how to build a project and deploy it. Things to look out for, what the system is doing and a whole lot more. You can bookmark it on twitter here. Or read it on the new site I just built that has clickable explainers on technical terms that I think is super useful to help you learn. Let me know what you think!
I’ll be on Every’s Vibe Code Camp today at 3:30 PM (UK time), i.e. an hour and a half after you get this email. Tune in.
Droid can now scan your repo and tell you if it is ready for agentic software development. You can run it in a droid session with /readiness-report directly in your terminal, or view readiness across your organisation in the app. There’s also an option to access reports programmatically via API. It also suggests quick and longer-term fixes so that you can compound the work you can get done.
Claude has a new constitution , and it has about 22.5k words (up from the old 2.5k words). Anthropic uses this document to guide Claude’s behaviour during training as well as when providing it to users. The new constitution has 5 major sections: being helpful, following Anthropic’s guidelines, being broadly ethical, being broadly safe and notes on Claude’s nature.
Students can now practise full SATs in the Gemini app using content from Princeton University. Gemini is also partnering with Khan Academy to teach students how to write better.
OpenAI released a post claiming that they’ll pay their own way for energy so that Stargate sites don’t increase nearby residents’ electricity bills. In other OpenAI news: ChatGPT will take a 4% cut for Shopify merchant sales, and it plans to charge advertisers on a per-view basis for the ads in the Free and Go plans.
AssemblyAI is a single API for building voice AI apps. Accurate speech-to-text, speaker detection, and real-time transcription in one platform. No infra to manage, pay-as-you-go pricing. Try 330+ free hours.*
🌐What I’m consuming
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Clawdbot showed me what the future of personal AI assistants looks like.
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A fun trick for getting discovered by LLMs and AI tools.
⚙️ Tools and demos
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Scroll.ai - Thousands of companies rely on Scroll to automate knowledge workflows across documentation, RFPs, agency work, and more.*
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Devin and Linear are both building a modern UI for code review. Linear has a waitlist, while Devin’s product is out and free to use for now.
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Craft Agents - Work with agents with a UX that’s not just for code. (read more — os repo)
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Tucuento - An interactive storytelling app designed for parents and children to create stories together.
🥣 Dev Dish
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Agentation: Give visual feedback to agents. Click elements, add notes, and copy markdown. npm i agentation.
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Remotion now has Agent Skills - Make videos just with Claude Code.
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Open Claude Cowork - Desktop chat app powered by Claude Agent SDK and Composio.
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nlsh - translates plain English into shell commands.
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mviz - create beautiful charts and reports for ad hoc analysis.
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VS Code extension for Claude Code is generally available. It matches the CLI experience more closely now with file mentions, slash commands and more.
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Stitch MCP Server - You can now export your designs from Stitch (Google’s AI design tool) to your choice of coding agent. (demo video)
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Mastra 1.0 - The typescript framework for building agents with a stable API.
🍦 Afters
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Codex has an official Discord community.
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Hume AI’s CEO and key team are joining Google.
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Gemini 3 Flash tops this new benchmark from Mercor that tests completing real, long-term tasks in Google Workspace.
That’s it for today. Feel free to comment and share your thoughts. 👋
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