The Walmart logo displayed in NYC
Brendan McDermid/Reuters
I recently asked a startup CEO for his take on the best AI coding tools. He mentioned the usual suspects: OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude Code.Then he brought up a less familiar name."There's another coding agent, Code Puppy, built by an amazing guy called Mike Pfaffenberger at Walmart, " this CEO told me. "It's got masses of usage in Walmart."The tip sent me down a rabbit hole that revealed something much bigger than another AI coding assistant. Code Puppy is part of Walmart's effort to avoid what many technology executives fear could become one of the defining business problems of the AI era: getting locked into a handful of powerful providers. The risk is familiar. Companies rush to adopt a breakthrough technology, redesign their systems around it, and then discover they've become dependent on a small number of suppliers. Switching becomes too expensive, disruptive, or risky.It happened with IBM. It happened again with cloud computing. Now, many companies worry that it could happen with AI.Code Puppy is Walmart's attempt to avoid that fate. It's become even more important lately, as companies blow through tech budgets by spending millions of dollars on AI coding tools and agents.
