This engineer now manages six coding agents a day and barely writes code himself
I use AI (Oct 2026)
A research engineer at Salesforce AI Research, spending roughly $3,000 a month on tokens, reports that agentic coding has made hand-written code nearly obsolete in his workflow: he now runs five or six Claude Code agents in parallel, each on its own Git worktree, writing code, running tests, and opening pull requests. He argues engineering isn't solved, though—agents still need human taste and produce over-architected slop on their own. He also drafted a personal AI policy to keep AI from leaking into life.
I do not believe engineering is solved: left to run on their own, agents will build poorly-functioning, over-architected, unreadable, self-congratulatory piles of slop.
- mef51
I always find so much cognitive dissonance in these kinds of posts.
> My most successful work this year was hand-writing a tool, replacing ~4,000 lines of vibe-code with a few hundred. My system has proven more flexible, easier to test, and more generalizable than what it replaced.
> agents still need human taste and experience to produce good work.
Where do you think human taste and experience in software comes from?
> overstimulating & exhausting in a way that coding never was.
> for many of us, honing the code, finding the right design, seeing the parts mesh together — that was the meditative purpose we found in our jobs.
> That’s not the only time AI waylaid me. LLMs could not figure out how to annotate that model’s training data correctly. I spent days going back and forth with them
> LLMs are not yet good companions when brainstorming complicated things.
Why do we expect this to get better? The training data will degrade in quality if more people rely on LLMs so I'd expect models to eventually start getting worse even if they currently enjoy apparent improvements in output.
> Writing code is solved.
What a strange thing to say given all the above experiences, which I think we all share.
Why are we willing to give up so much in terms of purpose and understanding for perceived productivity gains?
- Dzugaru
There is no substitute for reading the code in many many cases. I spend more than 3k/mo on tokens. I find incorrect assumptions baked into the code (the ultimate spec) and missed by the agents and tests daily. This is more pronounced in data analysis and complex systems.
As a side effect having to read the code at least once inevitably makes it way shorter and usually much better.
- Daunk
I believe that anyone who says that writing code is no longer needed, was probably not a very good coder to begin with. I have seen what the best models can do, and I've seen what people call "good", and I am not impressed.
However, I'm still split. Because this could mean that we see a jump in code quality, due to bad coders getting someone better to code for them. But we could see a decrease in code quality, due to less people "caring".
- citelao
OP: [last year][1], I shared how I was using AI day-to-day as an ordinary engineer. This year, I did it again!
It's crazy realizing that Claude Code only started getting big in the last year or so. It feels so different now, with all the new models & tools we have to use. I hope you enjoy!
- vagab0nd
Nothing against the post itself, but something I find funny: the development in AI is so rapid, that everyone thinks they are ahead of everybody else. Here we have a blog post telling us "coding is solved". In Oct 2026, how many of us don't know this already?
- creesch
> I still believe I use AI fairly typically
...
> Last October, I was an engineer on Microsoft’s Windows AI team. I am now a research engineer at Salesforce AI Research.
That's generally not how "typical use" works.
- sashank_1509
I find it amusing, that
> my uncle can create software
Is considered great
> my uncle can create music or art
Is not considered great.
I guess humans have agreed, that art is a skill you must learn if you want to produce it, but engineering or software is not a skill worth learning and we are happy if computers can do that for us.
So it’s great and amazing if anyone can create their gizmos and software to help them but not if they create music or digital images, which apparently it is wrong to prompt, and not a sign of a great future.
- simonw
> I also now reckon with the fatigue of using these agents. Managing 6 different conversations with 6 different robots about 6 different features is overstimulating & exhausting in a way that coding never was.
Big +1 to that.