Agents

Most teams measure AI impact on software delivery the same way: before and after comparisons on tasks that were already in the plan. A migration that used to take three weeks now takes two days. A bug that took a week to diagnose gets resolved in an afternoon. These are real wins.

There’s a growing belief in engineering circles that because coding agents can generate code so cheaply and quickly, we no longer need to invest in platform frameworks, services, and shared systems. The argument goes something like: code is essentially free now, so why bother with reusable building blocks? Just let agents generate what you need on the fly.

League (my day job) recently enabled mandatory GitHub Copilot code reviews on all pull requests. Not that long ago, I would not have supported this idea. Models, and the agent systems that use the models, have improved to the point of frequently finding non-trivial issues with code in a pull request.

For years, we’ve been told that software is eating the world. Big, cloud-hosted platforms — Salesforce, Notion, Slack, Jira, Airtable — working to solve every problem for every team, at any scale. And mostly, they delivered. SaaS transformed how businesses work.

I moved my 20+ year old WordPress blog off Bluehost and onto a modern static site setup with Hugo and Cloudflare Workers. What I expected to be a painful, multi-week project turned into a surprisingly smooth 4-day migration, largely thanks to working with Claude as a coding agent throughout the process.

A few months ago, I wrote about vibe coding and the challenge of shipping quickly-created prototypes. I ended that post suggesting we could “teach” coding agents about our platform primitives through instruction files and MCP servers. At my day job (League), we’ve been putting this idea into practice, and the results have been very encouraging.

AI-assisted coding tools and agents have unlocked an unprecedented level of functional prototyping. Not just for developers. Product managers, Designers, even the C-suite are building functional prototypes of their ideas in a matter of days, or even hours.