AI took my job as a coder. Then it made me a better software engineer.

I’ve been doing agent-supported coding for a few weeks now, and it definitely has changed the way I work. It’s not worse, just different. Which is remarkable, given that many programmers are having a disturbingly different experience: LLMs generating bad code, introducing bugs, even destroying data. I also read accounts from people lamenting skill atrophy, loss of job satisfaction, and a feeling of disconnection from their own codebase. It sounds like for these developers, the LLM became the mythical Monkey’s Paw that gives you what you want, and then takes away something dear to your heart.

I don’t want to find myself in this dark place eventually. I also don’t want to find myself stuck when LLM prices skyrocket, or the whole AI bubble bursts. The reason why I don’t think I will end up stranded is my attitude towards coding, or rather, to software engineering.

Passive and active guidance

Working with an agent is when good coding standards pay off. I got to enjoy that satisfaction before. It was when we introduced linting, unit and integration tests to our infra code a few years into our operation. We quickly realized how our confidence in the code we deployed was growing, while the amount of nightly emergency fixes was going down. Now, tests and linting rules are the guardrails that prevent agents from introducing regressions and becoming too creative with their new code.

Even with these guardrails in place, I don’t rely on the agent to find its way alone. My agent sessions look like pair programming, with the agent as the driver and me as the observer. I see other developers switch their attention to other things while the agent does its thing. I follow every step it takes. Not just because I don’t fully trust it. I also keep asking questions about its approach, and intervene to help it find the best solution. Every task results in a merge request that we review thoroughly before we integrate the changes into our codebase. (I just found a neat way to do these reviews in the terminal, about which I’ll write soon.)

Many years of experience have taught me that this kind of investment into “boring” engineering practices pays dividends. I don’t see why that should change with LLMs.

From programming to engineering

I don’t care how software is made, I care about what it does in the end. Loris Cro put it well in his article “. The agent saves them on Linear as project documents.

You might notice a pattern: all these improvements preserve knowledge and create transparency. This pattern now repeats like a fractal on all levels of my work. I’m writing less code, but I’m creating more value.

There’s more than just code

Like Mark Betz, “ is where we can figure it out together.

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