Hard Won Lessons from Building Effective AI Coding Agents – Nik Pash, Cline

Most of what’s written about AI agents sounds great in theory — until you try to make them work in production. The seductive ideas (multi-agent orchestration, RAG, prompt stacking) often collapse under real-world constraints. Why? Because they optimize for the wrong thing. In this talk, Nik Pash shares hard-won lessons from building large-scale coding agents at Cline — what failed, what survived, and why the next leap forward won’t come from clever scaffolds, but from evals and environments that truly measu ...