How do engineering and product jobs change when agents write the code?

“And I like to define what we've been calling frontier developers inside of Amazon by three behaviors that I've been seeing. One is hands off coding, frontier developers write maybe … of the code that they produce. The rest is agents. The second is that they interact with their agents infrequently. They'll aim to get their coding assistant to run for up to hours at a time without their intervention. And third is that they minimize idle time. These frontier developers tend to run multiple agents in parallel, … through a backlog of tasks.”

Clare LiguoriSenior Principal Engineer, AWS · Practitioner, Amazon

“In the simplest of terms, I defined an … org as one where engineers leverage AI agents as their primary means of producing engineering outcomes. So that meant that our engineers needed to treat agents as core members of their engineering workflow. … using AI to help them write code here and there, but actually working with agents, decomposing problems, delegating work, reviewing and verifying what was done. And we wanted them directing the work as their default way of operating.”

Angie JonesLed AI enablement and the agent engineering org at Block, as she describes in the talk; now VP of Developer Experience, Agentic AI Foundation · Leader, Block

“Productivity gains across our technology teams are among the most tangible results of our AI investment. Headcount grew 8% YoY in Q1’26 – a carryover effect of 2025 hiring – but productivity KPIs are growing 7-10x faster. Many of our most senior engineers that were previously spending most of their time reviewing code are now also building code because of the productivity gains enabled by AI tools. Rollbacks – code that is returned to its developer due to errors – are materially lower YoY.”

Mercado LibrePublished by the organization itself (regulatory filing), no named author

“Very often, we found that the role of the engineers was to tell Claude “no.””

AnthropicPublished by the organization itself (post), no named author

“What I've seen is that when we started introducing … and loops and eventually more autonomous work within the whole organization, a new technical path opened. All of a sudden, we were helping the agent with tooling, building tooling for the agent and that kind of reignited some of the developers … kind of felt that it wasn't for them. Not all of a sudden, they were like, yes, we can do this, we have that knowledge, we're like somehow helping this even with a kind of programmatic way.”

Patrick DeboisProduct DevRel Lead · Practitioner, Tessl

“Right now, … the workflow for the developers has changed and is changing further. They're spending more and more time in planning and code review because there's so much more code being generated that they're being forced to do it. This probably isn't the favorite type of work that developers love doing, code review.”

Ty SmithPrincipal Engineer, AI & Developer Productivity, Uber · Practitioner, Uber

“The human role shifts from guiding each line of code to defining the problem and setting review criteria.”

Michael TruellAuthor of the Cursor blog post; CEO of Cursor per the lead record (the page gives no title) · Executive, Cursor (Anysphere)

“Now, you asked specifically, do I write the code? I read … and what this says, I'm doing more and more and more, is asking the AI to explain back what it did to me, which is a little bit of the job I've compared it to being an engineering manager.”

Guillermo RauchFounder and CEO of Vercel · Executive, Vercel

“Context engineering, ability to multitask, and ability to review and verify the outputs: these skills have become much more important now because you’re able to parallelize a lot more than before.”

Uday Kiran MedisettyDistinguished Engineer · Practitioner, Uber

“The job of engineering is, in some sense: ‘how do you build the right context for the agents to produce reliable output?’ You need to get really good at context engineering.”

Uday Kiran MedisettyDistinguished Engineer · Practitioner, Uber

“Inside of Shopify, the amount of people I know who really write code is vanishingly small now.”

Tobi LütkeCo-founder and Chief Executive Officer · Executive, Shopify

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, merging some code every once in a while. Technically, like a lot of code is getting written for me to do all sorts of kinds of like analysis, like, you know, understand like trends, understand the business, understand the next feature, you know, how well our previous launches are doing. A lot of code is written by Codex for that. You know, I'm obviously not writing it by hand anymore.”

Thibault SottiauxHead of ChatGPT and Codex, OpenAI · Leader, OpenAI

“The result of all of this is you're no longer writing code. You're composing the factory that writes the code for you. … architect verification frameworks, and fundamentally ensure correctness. You're responsible for it, but without actually writing every line.”

Shardul VaidyaSolutions Architect, Data and AI, AWS · Practitioner, Amazon

“It definitely feels a bit different. It's maybe a bit less intense, but you're managing more things cognitively. I'm thinking of ideas that normally would've taken me a week to experiment with. And I think of multiple of these experiments and then fire them off all simultaneously. [It feels as] if I was a college professor with a whole swarm of research assistants, and they're all off doing things and it's coming back really rapidly.”

Peter MattisCo-founder and CTO, Cockroach Labs · Executive, Cockroach Labs

“85% of questions that are being asked to PMs now are fully answered with AI.”

Geoff CharlesChief Product Officer (CPO) · Executive, Ramp

“And we started building this agent. And this was in November 2025. And that was kind of the last time we've written code by hand. So after opening Visual Studio is each morning for … 20 years, I haven't really opened it after that. I even removed it from the taskbar. And it started with the deliberate choice. There was nobody kind of pushing us to do this. We just wanted to test it out first. And it kind of kept rolling.”

Hallstein BrøtanSenior consultant, Novanet; developer on Nordic Corporate Bank's system · Practitioner, Nordic Corporate Bank

“Because before, you could probably argue that the coding part was the bottleneck in our kind of product lifecycle. But now … is doing all the coding. And when he took over the coding, we found that the requirement part, the first part, is the new bottleneck. Because me and …, we can be tied up in some prioritized work. And then a product owner creates a new feature or a feature request in an Epic in the boards. And we won't kind of look at that before some time has passed. And then we have some questions, clarifications. And the product owner might not even remember what she wanted the first place when she wrote it. And it becomes this async ping-pong where you kind of try to figure out what to do. And you're not able to begin the implementation.”

Hallstein BrøtanSenior consultant, Novanet; developer on Nordic Corporate Bank's system · Practitioner, Nordic Corporate Bank

“Designers work, I would say like 50/50 in Figma and code at this point … of them do code. All of them … do push to production.”

Eric ZakariassonEngineer, Developer Experience and Product, Cursor · Practitioner, Cursor (Anysphere)

“I archive roughly 10 channels a day, it's bananas. And so one of the things that we were really focused on was how do you help PMs know where to focus and what to do and like go run down all the things that are important. And so I run this skill, what's up like six times a day, it pulls all of my relevant slacks and projects together. It pulls all of the things that I like, who I owe stuff to, what decisions are outstanding.”

Ezra MechaberGrowth product manager, Figma · Practitioner, Figma

“I tell my teams that I work with now that hiring is the least interesting way to solve every problem. We should almost never talk about hiring.”

Will LarsonCTO, Imprint · Executive, Imprint

“One of the worst parts of being an engineering manager in the 2010s was when you joined the ranks of engineering management, one of the first lessons you'd get was: 'you need to never make a technical decision again.' That's literally what I was told.”

Will LarsonCTO, Imprint · Executive, Imprint

“I think one thing that I have found for myself and any designer kind of coming into this project or really just this space is really wrapping your head around what a non-deterministic system is and how, what that means for when you're designing a screen. … when you first come into this space I think really understanding that these systems usually do like kind of end up the way you think … my Muse setup is completely different than yours is completely different to somebody else's. They're so personal and they can like do so many different things that you really kind of have to think more about the underlying foundation and the system, the architecture, the scaffolding that's in place and less about like, well, what about this one little thing here? Is it going to be just so”

Alex CornellDesign director on Muse, Meta · Leader, Meta

“don't promise an engineer the world when you give them a platform, give them a valuable use case because you have to go to where the pain lives. If I can prove to an engineer that the core value proposition of taking certain painful toil tasks away from you is beneficial, they will naturally understand that AI is not here necessarily to take away all of the work, just the parts of the work that are tedious, they require a … and tedium to go execute.”

Nikhil RamakrishnanAI Foundations & Developer Experience · Practitioner, Uber