Why I stopped writing code

Somewhere last year I noticed I was the slowest part of my own pipeline.

The agents weren't great at first. They still aren't perfect. But the moment I stopped using them as autocomplete and started treating them like junior engineers, the bottleneck moved off me. They never sleep, they don't get bored, and they never push back when I ask for the seventh revision.

Output went up. The relationship I had with my own code changed.

Most of the work that used to feel like coding now feels closer to reviewing. I scope. I taste. I reject. I ship. The agents type. Some weeks I write maybe forty lines of code with my own hands. The rest is judgment.

I think a lot of engineers are scared of this because they confuse the typing with the thinking. The typing was never the job. It was just the thing we were billed for.

If you're still measuring your week in lines committed, you're going to feel pretty strange in about eighteen months.