# My Thoughts on Agentic Coding > Source: > Published: 2026-08-20 09:22:01+00:00 20 August 2026 # My thoughts on agentic coding - There are likely thousands of these kinds of blog posts out there by now. I read at least a dozen of them, and they were more often than not written by people who have either more prior “traditional” software engineering experience (over 7 years) than I have, or people who who have been very passionate about the craft of writing and reviewing code. Usually there are two positions represented in those samples: - AI evangelists talking about a point-of-no-return - the paradigm shift happened, they are Yx more productive now, shipping code by hand is seen as insanity or cope. - Engineers who saw programming as a craft, experiencing the push of agentic coding in workspaces as deprecation of their skill-set and ultimately as some form of dehumanization. I always saw myself as a generalist, one who builds knowledge through deep-diving various topics periodically for shorter time frames. Even though my CV consists mainly of backend and data engineering roles, this description is applicable to a vast number of areas, including design, product development, branding; but also areas which are completely unrelated to the corporate business world, such as philosophy, music and art. For a profile such as mine, the shift to agentic coding therefore removes a bottleneck which was very real in the job market before Claude took over: The age of a required specialization is over. There is not as much need anymore to study a web framework for years to become really good at it or remember how a database works internally to boost its performance when your agentic assistant can answer most questions about them in a matter of seconds. On the other hand, having a good intuition for the bigger picture became even more valuable - the people getting most out of agentic coding tools are the ones, who can combine their expertise in software architecture with a feeling for UI/UX, documentation, business requirements, etc. I went down this path myself by using my skillset to work on ideas which were lingering in my head for quite a while already, one of them being a creative project where I worked on a real-time GPU-accelerated 3D Physarum transport network simulation in Rust/nannou, where hundreds of thousands of agents self-organize into luminous web-like structures through nothing but local chemical sensing,rendered with additive accumulation, bloom, and a density-mapped gold-to-ember color palette. Another project of mine included working as the sole engineer for a SaaS startup. Both of these projects were kind of unimaginable for me to build prior to the agentic revolution. They did require strong fundamentals and certain confidence in what I am doing, but I felt much more like a product developer/designer than a “traditional” software engineer, who sometimes struggled with handling async event loops and debugging a race condition for days or even weeks. While the possibilities that opened for me seemed like a gold mine, the feeling that I had in reality when finishing my simulation project was humbling. The inspiration for it was the work of a 3D artist I used to admire a lot when I was still a teenager and started my computer science studies. I was doing my fair share of 3D art myself, and his work - which was obviously inspired by complex biological processes, such as the growing of neural or bacteria networks - seemed unobtainable for me, a pure craft, which was truly one of a kind (the artist was chosen to work with NASA for one project at that time). It took me about ten minutes to research the biological processes he was inspired by using screenshots of his work, and about another one or two hours to implement simulations which were scaringly similar to his in a programming languages I had hardly used in years, with a framework I was sometimes interested in as student but never had the time enough to try in the end. Of course there are examples where I let my own creativity play a bigger part in the outcome of my agentic endeavours. But a part of this feeling still sticks - are these accomplishments really mine? Did the agent’s feedback during our conversation lead me down a certain path, that many others are taking by using the same agent, trained on the same data? I recently watched a video of a talk by Iain McGilchrist 1, who argued that AI replicates the left-hemisphere (rational thinking) functions at an immense speed, but does not possess the encounters made by the right-hemisphere, such as creativity, humour, narrative, the unknown and the sacred - things many of us connect to the essence of human being. The statement does light a spark of recognition for me - in the context of how I engaged with my ideas in the process of making them reality as stated in the aforementioned paragraphs. The collaboration was reduced to me talking to a machine only, as there was no need for exchange with a specialist or consulting someone more experienced, since when I was stuck, I could just ask my agent to guide me into a direction. A guide without those qualities. I remember the aforementioned artist offering courses of working with his C++ framework creativly. A collegue of mine joined one of those, and told me that while learning the skills necessary to create similarly beautiful things in 3D, the artist/teacher always let them experiment and meditate on their own ideas in the end. Sometimes he acted as a creative guide, but as a human, with a right hemisphere and the capabilities of encountering his students ideas in the moments as they crystallized, not as representions of ideas structured by tokens in some data center on the other side of the world. I think many software engineers, and possibly also people from other professions, will agree that human collaboration is dying off silently in the workspace. Instead of asking the human who coded an app about how some feature works under the hood, or where to look up a specific piece of code, we are now inclined to just spin up a terminal in the repository, prompt our questions, and move on. There is less friction in doing it this way - no waiting time until our colleague has the time or headspace to answer our inquiries, a verbose and clear language communicated by the agent, no misunderstandings, and if, an easy way to clear them up in a matter of seconds, and most importantly not bothering another human being with our problems if we can solve them ourselves. I think we do not understand what we lose by removing this friction fully yet. There is a strong feeling lingering inside of me, that what is lost is of quite a significance, and people will start to long for a past where this friction was part of their everyday lives. Today, the other is eliminated in favor of the same. The digital society is a society of the same. — Byung-Chul Han ## Footnotes - Iain McGilchrist, [talk on AI and the divided brain](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNAC_QVY9BU)(YouTube).[↩](#user-content-fnref-mcgilchrist)