Ray Myers argues AI agents should target quality, not code volume
In a clip from OpenHands, Ray Myers argues that the software industry is over-optimizing for output with AI, and that agents should be used to build software that actually works rather than generate ever-larger codebases nobody uses.
Score breakdown
Practitioners building with AI coding agents should evaluate success by software quality and usability — not lines of code or generation speed — as raw output becomes trivially cheap to produce.
- 01Ray Myers wrote a blog post titled "Velocity Is Dead: AI-Generated Compilers and the Future of Software"
- 02Cursor reportedly generated something close to a full web browser using AI
- 03Tropic reportedly generated something close to a C compiler using AI
In a clip published by OpenHands, Ray Myers discusses his blog post "Velocity Is Dead: AI-Generated Compilers and the Future of Software," making the case that the AI development community is chasing the wrong metric. He highlights recent demonstrations of AI-scale code generation — including Cursor producing something close to a web browser and Tropic producing something close to a C compiler — as evidence that raw generative capacity has outpaced the question of whether the resulting software is actually useful or maintainable. Myers also notes he personally nearly generated a C compiler at 1% of the cost, underscoring how accessible this kind of large-scale generation has become.
His central call to action is a shift toward what he describes as "audacious experiments in quality" — using agents not to maximize the size of a codebase, but to build software that works, scales, and gets used. The implicit critique is that velocity, as a proxy for progress, is now obsolete when AI can generate massive projects on demand; the harder and more important challenge is ensuring that what gets built is worth building.
Key facts
- 01Ray Myers wrote a blog post titled "Velocity Is Dead: AI-Generated Compilers and the Future of Software"
- 02Cursor reportedly generated something close to a full web browser using AI
- 03Tropic reportedly generated something close to a C compiler using AI
- 04Myers says he nearly generated a C compiler himself at 1% of the cost
- 05His argument: the industry is over-optimizing for output rather than quality
- 06He calls for agents to be used to improve software quality, not just increase speed or code volume
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