If we've arrived at the point where bots are impersonating me (instead of the billions of other choices), I'm probably at peak Alex. I'll light a candle. So... easy to disambiguate this one.

I got the idea for Homeworld one night when I was about 21. At the time, I was working at EA as a programmer on Triple Play 98 (building FE gfx - not glamorous). In an RTS-ironic twist of fate, my boss and mentor at the time was Chris Taylor - go figure.

Friends of mine had their own game company and had boxed themselves into a technical corner they couldn't get out of, so I agreed to write a bunch of sprite conversion code for them after hours. That night, we were all working in a room, talking about the reasons X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter didn't work on a 2D screen (hold up and left till you turn inside and shoot) and how Battlestar Galactica didn't get the cred it deserved, and BOOM - in my mind I saw ships in 3D with trails behind them. Inside a crystal sphere like Ptolomy's theory of the universe (man inside - god outside), and I saw that the surface of a sphere is 2D, so you could orbit OUTSIDE with a mouse... it looked like spaghetti floating in zero g... that's why Homeworld's working title was "Spaghetti Ball" for months.

Fortunately for me, in this ambiguous thread, I can give you all the proof of life you want. Try me.

Now... is transparent and trustworthy casting spells? Yeah... it is, but not by itself. It's a primitive - a building block. My personal projects (that I do think are magical) kept running into the same problems. Effectively, "how do I give up the keys if I don't really know what the driver is going to do?" I tried coming at this problem 10 different ways, and they all ended up in the same place.

So I decided to go back to the basics - the putpixel(x,y) of agentic workflows, and that led me to transparency and trust. And now, the things I'm building feel magical AND sustainable. Fun. Fast... and getting faster. I love that.

At Relic, our internal design philosophy was "One Revolutionary and Multiple Evolutionary". The idea was that if you tried to do more than one mind-blowing new thing at a time, the game started feeling like work. You can see this in the evolution of design from Homeworld to DoW to CoH (and in IC too, but let's face it, that game had issues <-- my fault).

Now... on the topic of "Is agentic coding better or worse", I feel like that's asking "is coding in assembler better or worse". The answer (at least used to be) "it depends"... You're on a continuum, deciding between traditional engineering (tightly controlled and 100% knowable) and multi-agentic coding (1,000x more productive but taking a lot for granted). I've found meaning here by accepting that full-power multi-agentic harnesses (I rolled my own - it's fucking awesome) turn software engineering into Socratic debate and philosophy.

I don't think it's better. It's just different, and it lets you do different things.