Innovators
People pushing the boundaries of agentic coding. Follow their work.
| Who | Contribution | Where to Follow |
|---|---|---|
| Boris Cherny | Creator and Head of Claude Code at Anthropic. Built the prototype in two months, runs 5 parallel Claudes, 80-90% of Claude Code is written by Claude Code. Author of Programming TypeScript. | Lenny's Podcast, Pragmatic Engineer |
| Andrej Karpathy | Coined "vibe coding" (Feb 2025), then retired the term for "agentic engineering" (Feb 2026). The shift: from autocomplete to orchestrating agents with oversight. Co-founder OpenAI, former Tesla AI. | X @karpathy |
| Simon Willison | Independent developer, creator of Datasette. Relentless documenter of AI tools. Called skills "maybe a bigger deal than MCP." Publishes TILs, transcripts, and security analysis of every Claude Code feature. | simonwillison.net, Substack |
| Jesse Vincent | Creator of Superpowers — the most popular Claude Code plugin (93K+ GitHub stars). Enforces strict RED-GREEN-REFACTOR TDD. Simon Willison calls him "one of the most creative users of coding agents." | GitHub obra/superpowers, Blog |
| Gergely Orosz | The Pragmatic Engineer. Published the definitive deep dives on how Claude Code is built and what agentic engineering means for staff+ roles. | Pragmatic Engineer |
| Rick Hightower | Creator of SkillzWave (44K+ agentic skills). Wrote the clearest breakdown of Agent Skills 2.0 — from custom instructions to programmable agents. | Medium |
Context
- Config Architecture — components and enforcement hierarchy
- OODA Loop — the weekly practitioner tracking cadence
- Best Practices — principles derived from the community
Questions
Who in this list are you not following yet — and what would you adopt from their work this week?
- What pattern have practitioners discovered that your config doesn't use yet?
- Which affordance is most underutilized across the community right now?