I've forgotten how to write code, or at least I think I have. Hard to be sure, I haven't done it for a while. But then, I start to muse, when did I last rack a brand new server and install Linux? If such a physical process can be reduced to a one-liner with Terraform, why should coding be sacred? No matter, I can still read code. And docs. And plans. Megatokens of it, and sometimes I even pay attention to what any of it says. Mostly I'm just there to press the big 'I'm accountable' button on the screen (at least, that's what I imagine it says). 'I, Lars Janssen, hereby certify that I asked at least two LLM agents to rip the submitted change to shreds in the name of review.'

It's easy to ask for reports on pretty much any subject. Actually reading them is another matter. But occasionally, I have to dig into the structure, pull up the code and make sense of what the different factions of bots have created. I am the final arbiter of good taste, even though every bikeshedding argument online has been distilled into the models so they probably know better than I what good is supposed to look like. Is that where we'll be at the end of the decade? A few months ago that future felt comfortably distant. Then something shifted.

Right now, the enthusiasts are hooked. They can't leave their desks without at least two agents spun up, pondering away, doing their bidding. You're simply not productive if you're not burning tokens while you're on the loo. Meanwhile the sceptics complain — not without good cause — that AI is slowing them down, and they could do it faster themselves. Both camps are right. Here's what it actually feels like today: Your agent produces an impressive diff in ten minutes. You spend an hour making sure it hasn't missed something that'll bite you in the arse later. Context evaporates. 200,000 tokens sounds generous until the agent starts compressing your conversation and forgets what you agreed ten minutes ago. Output is mind-numbingly verbose. You ask for a focused change and get a dissertation with unsolicited comments and gratuitous refactoring. The tooling integrations are hit and miss. Some MCPs are brilliant. Others feel like someone scribbled the API docs on the back of an envelope and let the model figure out the rest. And yet. Despite all of this, something has shifted. Nobody's arguing about whether it works any more. They're arguing about how.