With the rise of LLMs, I've noticed that my workflow has consistently changed month-over-month for about the past year. And overall, I've noticed a natural shift in the kind of day-to-day work that I'm doing as a developer. Sure, I'm still building features and shipping PRs, but the "how" I do my job, and the "where" I do my job has been subject to frequent changes and experimentation.

To add to this, my brain is being worked and tested in new ways too. In the past, I might have spent a few days or even weeks on one beautiful chart, getting it just right, and deeply understanding every decision and line of code that went into it. My team would have been ecstatic, and I would have felt a deep sense of accomplishment and reward from that. The reward being both my own personal satisfaction of learning, crafting something thoroughly, as well as recognization from my team and a belief that my work will yield a more delightful experience for users.

Now, for me personally, while I've always enjoyed the craft aspect of programming and I believe that's served me well in my career, I've also always been a mission oriented thinker too. I find more joy in seeing something I've worked on make people's lives better than I find in solving a really difficult programming task. But both sides have always been key in my personal Venn diagram of findings success in software development. With the recent rise of agentic programming, I've noticed that certain developers have had an easier time adopting new agentic coding practices than others. From what a can tell, those mission driven developers have had a little bit of an easier time letting go of their craft and leaning into the new abstraction layer. It's exciting, because more things can be shipped in less time. There is this sense that "anything is possible" feels more true than ever before.

I think this reality is ahead of most software organizations, which inevitably need to catch up and re-imagine what building software should look like in the next decade. In the meantime, it feels to me like developer experiences are ranging more widely than ever. This in combination with the reality that different developers are motivated differently, creates a very tumultuous landscape in the world of software development.

Product-minded developers that are embedded on agentic development teams are thriving. Craft-minded developers that are embedded on agentic development teams are concerned and questioning what they even do anymore. Product-minded developers that are stuck on traditional teams and restrictive environments are lusting for more dynamic team setups and more modern agentic development tooling. Craft-minded developers on traditional teams are jamming like they always have been.

There are some very real consequences of this recent agentic development shift. Things like cognitive debt are beginning to add up on teams including my own, and many organizations are learning this the hard way. Not to mention, developer satisfaction is more of a mixed bag than ever, which shows up in work dynamics.

With all of that being true, I'm writing this to reflect on how it can be difficult right now to find the right balance of being on the edge, while not losing sight of the details and the system you are working in. For now, I think it's important to still advocate for craftsmanship and understanding, while leveraging agentic tooling in places understanding is already locked in. Finding ways to improve code quality AND code comprehension is the sweet spot, and that takes agents as well as real human brain power and time. Never lose your edge!