Wes McKinney, Python HoF for Pandas, has been doing work on the agentic software development front. His new entrepreneurial concern, Kenn Software, is on a furious release cycle with what seems like a new drop every day. The tools that really have me hooked are:
- AgentsView: “Unified archive, search, and token intelligence for over 20 coding agents.”
- kata: “Lightweight local-first issue tracker for coding agents, with human-friendly terminal UI.”
- roborev: “Continuous code review and quality assurance for coding agents.”
I’ve been keeping up with Hugo Bowne-Anderson’s podcast series Show Us Your Agent Skills. By far the most useful to me has been Episode 1, where McKinney made an appearance. There I got my intro to AgentsView, kata, and roborev. At work, they have become an integral part of my coding workflow. AgentsView has revealed a couple of token and context busting mistakes I was making. Very handy as well if you work across different models and harnesses and want to compare outcomes. kata is just fabulous as a way to track and coordinate work stream items with agents and across harnesses. Whenever I’m waiting around for some agent to complete a task, I typically get ideas out of my head and into kata backlog. kata has replaced my habit of dumping plans into markdown files. roborev is excellent at keeping code reviews close, in the loop, and adversarial. I can attest that it’s approach is way better than integrating LLM based review into ci/cd workflows where the latency to review is killer.
At home, I’m trying to apply the same toolset to my coding projects. As I have multiple Macs and little computers to put to use, I’m looking forward to Ghosthub, “Native terminal for tmux, Herdr, and Zellij across your Mac and SSH hosts, with optional Git worktree management.”
Thanks much to Kenn Software for the great kit!! They also have a low key Discord where you can track progress and ask questions.