2025 was the year I stopped coding and pretty much spent most of my time writing markdown files that agents used to complete complex tasks. No different than writing tickets but with some extra technical context that guides the agents to resources ensuring a higher chance of success.

Within my organization there were a mix of emotions. Some senior staff jumped in head first into agents while some more cautions engineers decided only until the very end of 2025 to start. I am sold on this way of working. While it does present new challenges it feels like the obvious way forward.

Challenges

• The agents are so good at coding, you stop reading the code it writes. The meme: "Vibe coding is when 2 engineers can create the technical debt of 50." is so true. I have large chunks of my code I have never looked at. But this is no different than outsourcing the work to contractors.

• The fast progress is addicting. I found myself wanted to make progress faster and faster without slowing down to think deeper about the overall architecture. It's the new scrolling of endless content; same dopamine addiction. 

When I on boarded new developers in 2025 on my projects I asked them to please not code manually too much. I would say, I couldn't afford to pay them for artisan code. I explain how to use Cursor & VS Code Copilot and the rules files I created that provided 75% of the context the agent needed. But then I also showed them this slide.