The world of software development is changing very rapidly, and agentic coding is the catalyst. And by “very rapidly,” I mean “so fast that things are basically spinning almost out of control.”
What a fantastic time to be alive. With Claude Code, I have become (if I do say so myself) a 10x developer. Sometimes it feels like 100x. I find it all thrilling and amazing. For years, I’ve had a few ideas for websites, and I could never find the time to build them. I built one of them in about six hours a few weekends ago, and five of those hours were tweaking the look and feel.
It’s all intoxicating. To watch Claude Code work—to ask it to do something that I know would take a week, or to have it figure out some complex bug that I would have taken three days to debug—is almost too much to believe. I don’t have the superlatives to describe it.
This unique moment in the history of software developers is creating two groups of people that I, well, feel sorry for.
Too late to code
The first group is the software developers of the future who will take agentic development for granted. They will never have written a line of code. For them, software development will be nothing but agent-based. They will never have battled recalcitrant code, created an elegant class structure, or written a tight-running algorithm. They will never have fought the debugger or struggled to figure out why something doesn’t work. They will never have worked for weeks on a small but crucial feature. They will never have cranked out awesome code while in a flow state.
As a result, they will not feel the profound thrill of watching Claude Code do in 10 minutes what we mortals would have struggled to do in 10 days. Slowly but surely, we former code jockeys will retire, taking with us the legacy of actually writing code and of the early, heady days we are living through now, when suddenly—and irreversibly—we don’t have to write code anymore. For the next generation of developers, Claude Code will be the norm and not the incredible new thing.
There is a second group that I feel bad for—the folks who can’t see what an amazing moment we are in.
It is said that “There are none so blind as those that will not see,” and many developers are dismissing agentic coding. I, of course, find this astonishing, and yet there they are. These folks seem to think that “the code these tools write is slop” or “I tried it that one time and it wrote a bug.” Uh huh.
This view is summed up by a friend of mine who said, “It slows down development, and it behaves as an overeager junior dev at best.”
Too stubborn to see
Sure, it’s an overeager junior developer. An overeager junior developer who codes a hundred times faster than you do. Who works 24/7/365. Who, even if he writes bugs, writes them in 10 minutes, finds them in one, and has them fixed at the 12-minute mark. That kind of speed changes what the word “buggy” even means. Is it even a bug if you fix it so fast that it never makes it into the repository?
Yeah, he was a junior developer eight months ago, but he went to school and got his PhD while you weren’t paying attention anymore.
Maybe my friend doesn’t want to give up his code. Maybe he hasn’t looked deeply enough or recently enough. Maybe he’s just stubborn and close-minded.
He and those like him are the ones I really feel for—they are passing up the thrill of a lifetime. Those future developers don’t have a choice—they’ll never be taught to code. But the developers today who willfully pass up the opportunity to feel the earth shaking under their feet?
Their loss.
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