What agentic coding is really worth

Why this conversation

Writing software is one of the biggest things agents are used for, and what it is worth is very hard to measure. Jacek Migdał, the founder of Quesma, helps companies make the most of it; his company’s aim is to maximize the economic value of agentic coding. The host met him at the Quesma booth in San Jose on Friday 23 October, the second day of AGNTCon + MCPCon North America, where the demo was a backpack. The team had bought it from China; the hardware was good, the software less friendly, so they used Claude Code to reverse engineer it and turned it into their own merchandise. The rest of that Friday is in AGNTCon + MCPCon North America 2026: day two.

What the session logs show

Quesma’s product starts from the logs of agent sessions. Every time an agent takes an action, the data is collected. The collector is open source, so some people use it just to keep an archive. Once the data is in, credentials and private details are scrubbed out and it is encrypted. Quesma then runs its own analytics on it, with the help of other LLMs, looking for insights and things to improve, or simply to understand what is happening.

The host asked what value that brings. Jacek lists three things. The first is coaching people to prompt well. Many ask an agent for something 20 times when a clearer final goal would have done it at the first try.

The second is the setup. Give the agents the right data and design guidelines and they do a much better job, and work faster. “They use less tokens, so it’s like faster for humans, less tokens and less problems along the way.”

The third is accounting for the spend. Some companies want to split it across departments or cost centers, plan budgets or manage subscriptions, and decide whether a person should get 1,000 dollars a month or 100. “It could also depend on what are you working on, what’s the business value out of that.”

Installed on every laptop

The host asked whether it is an MCP server. The typical installation works differently: the company deploys Quesma through its MDM onto every laptop. A program on each machine, a MacBook or any other, looks out for new log files, JSONL files for instance, and uploads them as they appear. It covers all the harnesses, from Claude Code to Codex.

To begin, you go to quesma.com and download it. The collector is open source and free forever for anyone who only wants to archive the data, and individual users pay nothing either. For companies and enterprises there is a free pilot, which they may run by themselves, though so far Quesma has had the most luck running a beta in which it helps them get the most value.

Who owns the data

The host said that in Europe people worry a lot about sovereignty, and asked whether customers can choose where their data lives. They can: that is why Quesma made the solution open source. One mode runs on your own cloud, using your own key; on-prem is mainly for bigger companies that have some resources. Jacek believes this is data a company should own. Each time a company uses AI, it also shows how it talks and, in the end, how it thinks.

Where the savings go

Software engineering is still where agentic coding was taken up first, and companies that employ software engineers have done well with it. It can make sense from about 5-10 people, for anyone who has to watch a budget; a startup burning money might not care yet.

How much can be saved? Because these are new areas, there are many inefficiencies, and a better setup can mean spending 50% less. But many customers do not pocket the difference. Before, AI was limiting what they could attempt, so as it gets cheaper they use more of it, in new areas, and become more productive: a Jevons paradox. Jacek puts it in one line. “You take pictures cheaper, so you take more of them.”

Quesma also writes benchmarking posts on its blog, and many have made it to the top of Hacker News.

When it comes out

The episode is edited and in the release order. Like every episode it goes out on YouTube first, then on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music.