There's no more craft in software development

A few days ago, I caught myself doing something odd. I'm reviewing a pull request generated by Claude Code. Tests pass, linter's green. I click, I merge. Six seconds. I didn't really read that code.

Later that afternoon, an uncomfortable question: could I still write that code by hand, line by line, in 2026? Honest answer: no. Not with the same rigor, not in flow. And I'm not alone. It's the question no one dares ask since agents arrived.

The job changed, and that's not an opinion

It's not LinkedIn gurus saying this:

Arthur Mensch (Mistral), testifying before the French National Assembly: "engineers at Mistral no longer write a line of code. You're no longer a craftsman, you're a manager."
Andrej Karpathy dropped "vibe coding" for agentic engineering: you no longer write the code, you orchestrate agents that do, and you supervise.
Sundar Pichai (Google): 75% of new code is AI-generated and approved by engineers.
Anthropic: for most products, it's ~100% generated code.
Stripe ships "Minion": agents producing 1,300 pull requests a week, zero lines written by hand, on rails that process over $1 trillion in payments a year.

The workflow flipped. You spend your day validating, comparing, choosing, judging. You no longer write code, you write decisions.

The paradox that stings

Here's the trap no one spells out: to steer AI, you need to understand what it does. But steering is exactly what makes you lose that understanding. The more you steer, the less you can tell whether you're steering well — because your only evaluation tool is the very skill you're losing.

It's not fantasy. An Anthropic study (52 junior developers learning a Python library): those using AI finish faster but score 17% lower on a comprehension test. An MIT study points the same way: lower brain connectivity, and 83% of users unable to recall the key points of a text they just produced with AI. It's cognitive offloading: you delegate, and your brain stops crossing the problem.

The trap is vicious because you don't feel incompetent. You feel hyper-productive. PRs merge, velocity climbs, the demo works. But underneath, the foundation that let you judge is crumbling.

Sorting the atrophies

No moral panic either: AI doesn't make you dumb. You have to sort.

Acceptable atrophy: syntax you no longer know by heart, React boilerplate, regexes you don't type from memory, ORM vs SQL. We already accepted this with IDEs and Stack Overflow.
Dangerous atrophy: judgment, system-level reading, the ability to audit code and diagnose a failure. That, you must not let go.

My discipline to keep the ear

A base of fundamentals I refuse to drop: I read code cold without AI, I solve algorithmic problems by hand now and then, I read CVEs, postmortems, and blogs from people running things in production.
Safety nets: automated tests, but also human review on critical zones, monitoring that alerts on latency drift, canary deploys, and zero PR touching payments, auth or security without a line-by-line read — by a human, not the AI.
Keep coding by hand, at least 10-20% of the time. Not out of nostalgia, out of professional discipline.

What bothers me most is the fate of junior developers. A junior starting in 2026 who codes 100% with AI will have a problem, not tomorrow, but in five years, when they're supposed to become senior. They'll never have logged the thousands of hours of fighting their own code that build the foundations. Great prompter, unable to audit.

It's not their fault, it's what the market offers them — and it's why junior hiring is collapsing (-25% on entry-level in the top 15 tech companies, up to -67% in some segments). If you're senior, you're partly responsible for these juniors: make them do things without AI, even if it's less efficient short term. It's their long-term survival.

The takeaway

You're no longer a developer, you're a product manager of agents. The job changed, that's settled. But being a PM of agents isn't sitting back and watching: it's keeping an ear able to hear when the orchestra goes off-key. Without that ear, you're not a conductor, you're a guy waving a baton in front of agents doing whatever they want.

I break it all down on video: watch on YouTube.

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