I use coding agents every day. I haven’t written a line of code for any of my side projects in many weeks. I don’t use coding agents in my day job yet, but only because the work requires a deeper knowledge of a huge code base than most large language models can deal with. I expect that will change.

Like everyone else in the software development business, I have been thinking a lot about agentic coding. All that thinking has left me with six thoughts about the advantages of using coding agents now, and how agentic coding will change developer jobs in the future.

Coding agents are tireless

If I said to a junior programmer, “Go and fix all 428 hints in this code base, and when you are done, fix all 434 warnings,” they would probably say, “Sure!,” and then complain about the tediousness of the task to all of their friends at the lunch table.

But if I were to ask a coding agent to do it, it would do it without a single complaint. Not one. And it would certainly complete the task a hundred times faster than that junior programmer would. Now, that’s nothing against humans, but we aren’t tireless. We get bored, and our brains turn fuzzy with endless repetitive work. 

Coding agents will grind away endlessly, tirelessly, and diligently at even the most mind-numbingly boring task that you throw at them. 

Coding agents are slavishly devoted

Along those same lines, coding agents will do what you ask. Not that people won’t, but coding agents will do pretty much exactly what you ask them to do. Now, this does mean that we need to be exacting about what we ask for. A high level of fastidious prompting is the next real skill that developers will need. It’s probably both a blessing and a curse, but if you ask for a self-referential sprocket with cascading thingamabobs, a coding agent will build one for you.

Coding agents ask questions you didn’t think to ask

One thing I always do when I prompt a coding agent is to tell it to ask me any questions that it might have about what I’ve asked it to do. (I need to add this to my default system prompt…) And, holy mackerel, if it doesn’t ask good questions. It almost always asks me things that I should have thought of myself. 

Coding agents mean 10x more great ideas 

If you can get a coding agent to code your idea in two hours, then you could undoubtedly produce many more ideas over the course of a month or a year. If you can add a major feature to your existing app in a day, then you could add many more major features to your app in a month than you could before. When coding is no longer the bottleneck, you will be limited not by your ability to code but by your ability to come up with ideas for software.

Ultimately, this last point is the real kicker. We no longer have to ask, “Can I code this?” Instead, we can ask ourselves, “What can I build?” If you can add a dozen features a month, or build six new applications a week, the real question becomes, “Do I have enough good ideas to fill out my work day?”

Coding agents make junior developers better

A common fear is that inexperienced developers won’t be employable because they can’t be trusted to monitor the output of coding agents. I’m not sure that is something to worry about. 

Instead of mentoring juniors to be better coders, we’ll mentor them to be better prompt writers. Instead of saying, “Code this,” we’ll be saying, “Understand this problem and get the coding agent to implement it.”

Junior developers can learn what they need to know in the world of agentic coding just like they learn what they need to know in the world of human coding. With coding agents, juniors will spend more time learning key concepts and less time grinding out boilerplate code.

Everyone has to start somewhere. Junior developers will start from scratch and head to a new and different place. 

Coding agents will not take your job

A lot of keyboards have been pounded over concerns that coding agents are coming for developer jobs. However, I’m not the least bit worried that software developers will end up selling apples on street corners. I am worried that some developers will struggle to adapt to the changing nature of the job. 

Power tools didn’t take carpentry jobs away; they made carpenters more productive and precise. Developers might find themselves writing a lot less code, but we will be doing the work of accurately describing what needs implementing, monitoring those implementations, and making sure that our inputs to the coding agents are producing the correct outputs.

We may even end up not dealing with code at all. Ultimately, software development jobs will be more about ideas than syntax. And that’s good, right?