It's been 3 months since I last wrote a line of code. That is the longest break I've taken since the 1990s.
But here is the wild part: in these last 3 months, I have shipped more code than I did in the entire year before.
AI agents are writing my code now, but the biggest revelation isn't about the syntax. It's about the management dynamic.
I've been a Team Lead, I've even been a CTO. In the past, stepping away from the keyboard to instruct other engineers always felt like a necessary compromise. You sacrificed tight control in order to scale, often dealing with the inevitable friction of communication overhead, competing egos and the gap between your vision and their execution. Sometimes, it felt a bit hollow.
Using AI agents completely flips that script.
It feels like managing an infinite team of eager junior engineers, but the "human tax" is entirely gone. You just get pure, frictionless execution. They instantly understand what you want to build and get straight to work.
For the first time in my career, I've found the perfect balance: the massive scale and leverage of a manager, combined with the uncompromising control of an IC.
It completely kills the old trade-off between scale and control. But it does leave me with a massive question: if a single IC can now output like a whole department without the management overhead, what does the shape of a standard engineering team even look like two years from now?