Tales from the jar side: AI Codecon, CLI Agents, Yard Goats, and the usual social media silliness

A murder of crows? You mean caws of death? (rimshot)

Aug 31, 2025

Welcome, fellow jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of August 24 - 31, 2025. I didn’t have any classes this week, but I was awfully busy anyway.

AI Codecon

O’Reilly Media is hosting a free (!) day-long online conference on September 9. They’re calling it AI Codecon, and the link for info is here.

As the website says, the focus this time is on:

Agentic interfaces: Moving beyond chat UX to sophisticated agent interactions
Tool-to-tool workflows: How agents chain across environments to complete complex tasks
Background coding agents: Asynchronous, autonomous code generation in production
MCP and agent protocols: The infrastructure enabling the agentic web

My talk is during the “Tool-to-tool workflows” section, and is called A Hitchhiker’s Guide to to AI Coding Agents. The basic abstract is:

In the vast and occasionally bewildering universe of AI-powered coding tools, a new wave of “agentic” assistants is charting fresh territory for developers. From Claude Code and Codex CLI to Junie and Gemini CLI, these agents promise to navigate codebases, automate tasks, and even refactor your work.
Ken Kousen, author of several O’Reilly books and courses, introduces the key players, shows quick demos of what they can (and can’t) do, and shares tips on making them work for you, not the other way around.

I’m still trying to figure out exactly how I’m going to do all that in fifteen minutes. But hey, the price is right.

This week my new semester is starting at Trinity. The students in my Senior Seminar class are required to make a 10-minute presentation on their senior projects at the end of each semester, which means I’ll be asking them to present a few times during the semester as well. Of course, they don’t even have projects yet, much yet any work done to report.

Now that I have a 15-minute talk coming up in about a week, it occurred to me that I can give my talk for them this week and show how I go about preparing and presenting in such a short time slot. At least it will give them a chance to laugh at me in class.

Which reminds me that I need some new AI jokes. If you know any good ones, please send them along, preferably before Thursday.

Agents Working Again

If you’d asked me a couple weeks ago, I would have said that Claude Code was my primary tool that I used every day, that Google’s Gemini CLI was, at best, okay, and that OpenAI’s Codex CLI was a complete disaster.

How quickly things change. In just the last week or so, all of them released new versions, and now the differences aren’t so stark.

Claude Code is still by far the best of the lot, though I battled with it nearly all week before resolving the issues I had. It’s now running fine, but I lost a few days getting there.

Gemini is fine, except I hit the limit on gemini-2.5-pro too quickly. It then switches me to gemini-2.5-flash, which really is inferior. Google wants another $25/month (or $300/year) for Gemini Code Assist, and I can’t see my way to that right now.

Codex is the big surprise, though. It was almost unusable recently, but they completely changed it. Now it’s fine. Other than the fact they configure MCP servers using TOML files (seriously?), it’s now totally usable.

I currently have all three open in different console windows on my same project, which is the one I’m planning to show in my presentation. I’m not sure that’s as good a think as I was hoping, though. It’s more like keeping three eager puppies under control than having a helpful team of AI assistants. At least they all apologize when I correct them.

The funny part, which I hope I have time to explore before my talk, is that you can configure codex as an MCP server itself, and I think I can do the same with Gemini. That means I think I can make custom agents in Claude Code that delegate work to both Codex and Gemini and reports on their progress. That could be entertaining.

I’ll know the situation much better by next week’s newsletter.

Hey, another milestone

I mentioned last week I’m on this project at O’Reilly Media where I’m making a bunch of short videos on different Java skills. I finally finished all 26 (!) of them, though we’ll see the editor needs me to update any of them. What this really means is I haven’t done anything on the Tales from the jar side YouTube channel for quite a while. Now hopefully I can get back to it, even though I’ll be in my Trinity semester. We’ll see.

Memories, but not that song

On a personal note (no pun intended), I performed a musical number this week on request: The Impossible Dream from Man of La Mancha. I’m a tenor, so I never really considered that in my repertoire (it’s more of a baritone piece), but hey, I figured, why not?

It definitely brought back memories. My very first audition was for our high school musical way back as a junior, which as I recall was some time in the latter half of the 15th century. All I remembered that the song was written in an odd time signature (it’s in 9/8, so you have to think in triplets — that took getting used to). What surprised me was how quickly it all came back to me. Honestly, I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday, but I can remember that? My memory was such a sponge back when I was 16.

The performance went quite well, so I’ll have to try it again in another 50 years or so.

Yard Goats

Speaking of musical performances, my wife signed us up to sing the National Anthem with the choir from First Church (Glastonbury, CT) at a Hartford Yard Goats baseball game.

The Yard Goats apparently have two official mascots: a green male goat named Chompers and a blue female goat named Chew Chew. This is Chew Chew, with my wife, who is always a good sport about these things.

I know what you’re thinking. You want me to say “Chew Chew, with my wife (right)” just to get me into serious trouble. But I’ve been married for a really long time. I don’t make rookie errors.

The Yard Goats have a nice stadium in downtown Hartford. Our performance went well, and we hung around until the 7th inning stretch, but the team really isn’t very good. They’re the AA affiliate of the Colorado Rockies, and the Rockies are by far the worst team in baseball this year (current record: 38 - 98, so just shy of 100 losses with 20 games left in the season). If the Yard Goats had anybody decent, presumably they would have been brought up to the majors long ago.

Still, the weather was truly spectacular. A reasonably good time was had by all.