Don't delegate thinking, delegate work

The developers who are juggling 10 agents are either spending most of their time doing that planning and review work or they’re writing a lot of code that technically runs but creates tomorrow's mess.

All day, I hear these grandiose stories of developers delegating all their coding to AI juggling 10 coding agents at the same time. I don’t doubt them. But I question how much of their day is actually spent “coding” (letting the agents rip) versus planning and reviewing code; I know most of my day lives in the latter two. Otherwise I would just produce garbage - I wouldn’t know what I want to build and how I want to build it.

The faster we can code, the more code we produce, the more we need developers that can make sense of it. I don’t need to understand every nook and cranny of the software I am building, but I have to spend the time to build up the right mental model of how the code works so I know what a good solution for the next feature looks like and where and how I want to integrate it.

You can automate syntax but not semantics. You can’t delegate understanding. The AI can write the implementation, but it can’t tell you whether you’re building the right thing or building it in a way that won’t collapse under its own weight once it hits production. That judgment - knowing when to add abstraction versus when you’re overengineering, recognizing that this new feature is going to create tension with that other system, seeing the shape of the codebase and where this piece actually belongs, understanding the business domain so you can build the right data model - that’s the irreducible core of the job.

The bottleneck now isn’t typing, it is understanding and problem solving, it is the thinking that happens before and after the code appears. What problem am I actually solving? Does this approach make sense given what already exists? Will this make the codebase more comprehensible or less? Those questions don’t get faster to answer just because the code appears faster. If anything, they get harder, because now you’re reviewing 500 lines instead of 50.

The developers who are juggling 10 agents are either spending most of their time doing that planning and review work or they’re writing a lot of code that technically runs but doesn’t fit or creates tomorrow’s mess.

Don’t delegate thinking, delegate work.