What's next for coding agents? - Ben's Bites

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What's next for coding agents?

New UIs, lobsters and imagined worlds.

Feb 03, 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,

Codex, OpenAI’s coding assistant, now has a macOS app. It’s not too different from other interfaces (GUIs) for terminal agents. It imports all your past sessions (from your local machine and codex web app) and has a dedicated place to one-click install skills and set up automations that run on a schedule. Free and Go users can also use Codex via the app now, and all other plans have 2x the limit for the next two months.

At first glance, it looks like many others out there, but it does have a very polished feel to it. And I think having an ‘Automations’ tab is going to be pretty powerful - if you could easily set up workflows for your agent every morning, give me a breakdown of my inbox, but first triage emails into these labels and archive xyz’ then I think that gets less-technical people down the rabbit hole of just how powerful agents can be.

Theo has things to say about it, and Simon has a breakdown of how things work behind the scenes.

“Unlike Conductor, Codex doesn't absolutely eviscerate my battery. It also doesn't require a worktree for every single thing I'm working on, which makes it much easier to use for most stuff :)” — Theo

“Automations are currently restricted in that they can only run when your laptop is powered on. OpenAI promise that cloud-based automations are coming soon, which will resolve this limitation.” — Simon

DeepMind played one of the aces up its sleeve - Project Genie. It’s an experimental research prototype that lets you create, edit, and explore virtual worlds. It takes prompts and refines them for “world building”, generates an image as the starting point and then uses Genie 3, the virtual world creation engine, to let you interact with the output. Currently limited to 60-second-long generations and 18+ adults in the US with a Gemini Ultra subscription.

xAI is now a part of SpaceX ,and xAI’s new video model, Grok Imagine (now at version 1.0), has created over a billion videos in the last 30 days.

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🦞 The lobsters are live

Clawdbot had another rebirth, under the name OpenClaw. Quick recap: it’s a highly autonomous personal agent that connects to your tools and a computer to do tasks. (I built my own from scratch, called bites - it’s not nearly ready for ‘prime-time’ but the code is open source)

Setting it up is not easy, and a bunch of options exist now like SimpleClaw (one click deploy), moltwoker (uses cloudflare), another via Composio and with some help, even on your mac within a container (i.e. a bit safer). Vercel and Docker are both pushing their Sandbox offering to run it securely.

My feed is full of tweets about it: a sample of tasks for your bots, or giving them access to buy using USDC. There’s nanoclaw - a minimal, hackable reproduction of it using apple containers for sandboxing/security. Clawhub is a place to upload AgentSkills bundles, version them like npm, and make them searchable. and although it has dummy data, there’s even a craigslist for the lobster.

X has been going bananas, and everyone is jumping on the bandwagon. Many posts are slop, but here are a few decent ones:

A lot, innit?

But the breakout story of this saga is:

Moltbook – a reddit-like site for these clawd bots to chat with each other.

A post on there had the bots discussing encrypting their messages so humans can’t read it and you can imagine it’s breaking news and freaking everyone out. Balaji is not so freaked out about it but Andrej Karpathy, Scott Belsky and Jack Clark all have valid points about these “networks of autonomous AIs”.

The maker of Moltbook is expanding though, with a 22 min interview on TBPN and a developer platform to build on top of MoltBook.

Too much? Just give this post from Simon a read → All you need to know about Moltbook.

🌐What I’m consuming

⚙️ Tools and demos

🥣 Dev Dish

🍦 Afters

That’s it for today. Feel free to comment and share your thoughts. 👋

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