Claude, what's a Software Developer?
Agentic coding tools are making it virtually unnecessary for software developers to write code themselves, which begs the obvious question: what the hell are they supposed to spend their time on instead?
"Technology will always win" - When Intel's CEO Andy Grove coined this famous saying he spoke out a truth that many industries in the past have had to abide by. Whether it were machines replacing manual labor or the internet replacing personal interactions and print media; if a technology could be used to increase productivity for the private sector, no law or prejudice could stand in its way for long.
In 2026 another such transformative technology has reached maturity: Agentic Coding. This time it is the world of software development that is being transformed and intellectual labor that is being replaced. As always whenever technology comes knocking at the door of an established profession the reactions are mixed. Ranging from delusions of an emerging utopia to protests driven by fear and prejudice. Some developers have embraced the use of agentic coding early on and see LLM prompts as their new universal programming language. Others have sought refuge in the hopes of LLMs hitting a plateau and thus not becoming a viable replacement for manual programming.
So far it seems like this plateau will be high enough to allow coding agents to beat most solo programmers. Pair them with an experienced programmer by their side to review their results and guide them through brief phases of confusion and you can tell the rest of your engineering team to focus on testing or a new career path. So if software developers no longer need to write code and coding agents end up writing cleaner code than the developers ever could, what should they focus their newly won time on?
"Software developers design, build, test, deploy and maintain applications or systems". If you have studied computer science, you have likely been greeted with this or a similar definition of what your future work might look like. Once you started working you probably realized that most of your time does not go into designing and building - the task that many developers find most rewarding. In 2019 software developers spent around 30% on writing code and another 35% on maintaining existing code according to SonarSource. In 2026 these numbers have already shifted severely according to Chainguard: Only around 16% are spent on writing code. The satisfaction that developers draw from their work will thus have to come from other places in the future.
One possible scenario – especially when working on young systems that are still expanding their feature set – could be that more time can be spent on designing and testing. Instead of relying on a single software architect to make all the major design decisions and a team of testers to ensure that a feature's requirements are fully met, a single software developer could own all three phases of the feature development. The expectations towards this software developer would be highly elevated. Not only would they need to bring a deep knowledge in system design and software testing but also still have enough actual programming skills to handle times when a coding agent hits a wall. For the right kind of people these elevated expectations could go hand-in-hand with elevated satisfaction. Software developers could proudly go home after work, knowing that the feature they are working on is theirs truly.
Most of us however do not work on early stage systems. Once a system has reached some maturity a lot of time is spent on maintenance and bugfixes while new features are rarely developed. If used correctly, coding agents can take care of a large portion of maintenance work. Keeping dependencies up to date, patching vulnerabilities or responding to bug-reports are all tasks that can be reliably automated with coding agents by now. That should leave plenty of time to finally allow developers to focus on their tech debt and list of improvements they have been dreaming of applying for so long. Instead of painstakingly improving a system's codebase software developers would finally be improving the system's design on a regular basis. This however requires developers who know how to improve a system's architecture and use novel technologies to better conform to non-functional requirements.
No matter what kind of system a developer is working on agentic coding will not leave them without tasks but rather with more challenging ones. Writing code and maintaining code bases has never been considered to be the peek of a software developer's abilities. Designing systems and adapting them to adjust to new requirements and technologies are tasks that used to be handled only by highly seasoned developers, which would act as a bottleneck for design decisions and improvements. With the heavy use of agentic coding suddenly a large portion of developers have the chance to step up and remove such bottlenecks. This will require them however to take on more responsibility and more importantly deepen their understanding of system design.
