How you deal with coding agents isn’t all that different from how you would deal with a real live developer. You have an array of choices to make about who/what will write the code, what they will be building, and when their work can be called finished. You have to guide them, give them clear instructions, review their code, and decide when that code is ready to be checked in.
Career twists and turns
All of that should sound pretty familiar to managers and individual contributors alike. In fact, one might argue that this is the job now — managing coding agents. Even the most junior of developers will be managing a “developer” in the future.
What does that mean for the career path of a person who manages coding agents all day? I hate to say it, but I don’t know and I don’t think anyone can say for sure. The set of skills required to successfully lead a “team of coding agents” compared to those needed to manage a team of real live people overlap, but they are not congruent.
