Practical Agents with Donny Wals

Donny Wals returns to talk through a year of agentic coding. We go through how it's changed his architecture decisions, reviewing PRs he didn't write himself, managing tasks and context across parallel agents, and the gym-workout crash he fixed from his phone mid-set — plus where he still doesn't trust the agent: SwiftData migrations.

Guest

• Donny Wals
  • Donny Wals 👾 (@donnywals.bsky.social) — Bluesky
  • Donny Wals 👾 (@DonnyWals) / X
  • Donny Wals (@donnywalsdev) • Instagram photos and videos
  • donny wals - YouTube
  • Donny Wals (@donnywals@chaos.social) - chaos.social
  • Donny Wals | LinkedIn

Related Links

• Cursor - https://cursor.com
• Bitrise - https://bitrise.io
• Notion - https://notion.so
• Raycast - https://raycast.com
• Grill with Docs - https://www.aihero.dev/grill-with-docs
• Maxine - One Rep Max Tracker (Donny's workout app) - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/maxine-one-rep-max-tracker/id6615073254
• GRDB.swift - https://github.com/groue/GRDB.swift
• SundialKit (Leo's watch communication library) - https://github.com/brightdigit/SundialKit
• Fluent (Vapor's ORM) - https://docs.vapor.codes/fluent/overview/
• NSPersistentCloudKitContainer - https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coredata/nspersistentcloudkitcontainer
• Practical Core Data - https://practicalcoredata.com
• Practical Combine - https://practicalcombine.com
• Practical Swift Concurrency - https://practicalswiftconcurrency.com

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• Practical Year - Part 2 with Donny Wals
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Chapters

• (00:00) - The Agentic Coding Shift
• (15:55) - The Gym Crash Story
• (20:54) - Architecting for Agents
• (34:04) - Task & Issue Tracking
• (37:40) - Core Data vs. SwiftData

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Credits

Music from https://filmmusic.io "Blippy Trance" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)