Over the past few weeks, I've been working extensively with coding agents. I've abused Anthropic's no-limit Claude Code offering during the holidays. I've been using Codex daily while building inside a modern product team.
This is not an "AI will replace engineers" post. If you take a quick look at where non-techies struggle with vibe-coding, it's clear why technical skills will keep mattering. As we churn out more software and more complex products, this technical knowledge will be paramount. There will be more dev jobs, not fewer.
But...
I’m starting to notice a clear rift between the agent-powered engineers and those who handcraft their code. The difference in productivity is vast. Some engineers still use Cursor or CoPilot to autocomplete their syntax manually. Others fix four bugs in parallel using Conductor.
The difference is immense, and I wanted to share my sentiment with you.
Handwritten code, across the board, is not better than LLM-generated code. Manual coders produce far fewer unit tests. Manual code reviews take ages and stall the delivery pipeline. The quality of these reviews is often worse than the automated ones.
Coding agents excel at writing new features. They churn out great documentation. They are awesome at hunting down hard-to-find bugs. They are fantastic at code reviews and refactoring. All they need is our guidance.
Some engineers still use Cursor or CoPilot to autocomplete their syntax manually. Others fix four bugs in parallel using Conductor.
Instead of focusing on variables and functions, our job becomes pair programming as the navigator — the one who never touches the keyboard. The navigator steers the code on a much higher level. They instruct refactorings and suggest improvements. They never type.
We used to write machine code, then moved to assembler and then invented programming languages. We are now again in a position to move to a higher tier: leaving the syntax level. Writing code in an editor will become a novelty.
To be clear: most software engineers in 2026 will still use a Cursor-style IDE to generate syntax. The industry changes fast, but not overnight.
It is, however, clear to me that a comet is headed straight for the planet of the manual coders. By 2030, nobody will be writing code anymore. Nobody will use a traditional IDE like PhpStorm or Cursor. We will be prompting agents to code for us without caring too much about syntax. Traditional notorious clean code hardliners like Uncle Bob are enthusiastically switching to Claude Code. Even Linus Torvalds is coming around on vibe-coding!
The future is here, but as usual, it is not evenly distributed. That poses a risk to agency developers, whose business model is billing by the hour. But it also creates the opportunity to be ahead of the curve.
Where are most of you on this journey? If you are still generating code in an IDE, what is stopping you from leaving the syntax level?
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