While thinking about what is happening in IT right now, one analogy suddenly came to mind. We are living through a kind of industrial revolution in programming.

Until recently, we programmers wrote a lot of code by hand. We spent most of our working time typing code and assembling the final system out of many small parts ourselves. Now that coding agents have appeared, writing code has become very fast and cheap. More and more work is done not through manually typing lines, but through expressing intent: what exactly you want to get in the end, how it should work, and which constraints matter. The agent then tries to turn that into an implementation.

Something very similar happened during the Industrial Revolution. Before factories, there was a lot of manual labor and craft-based production: things were made slowly, expensively, and depended heavily on the skill of a specific person. Then factories, mechanization, standardization, and mass production arrived. A huge layer of manual labor was automated. Craft did not disappear completely, but it became more of a niche form of work. It seems to me that the same thing is now happening to code. AI agents are automating code writing, while writing code by hand is gradually turning into a kind of craft labor.

But that does not mean a programmer’s work has lost its value. Its form is changing, and so are the tools. Other engineering practices have not gone anywhere. On the contrary, their value has increased dramatically. If coding used to take up 70-80% of the time in product development, now for many people it shrinks to 10%, and everything else becomes more important: product thinking, client communication, requirements analysis, architecture design, UX, communication inside the team, acceptance of the final result, QA, and product support through metrics and observing what is actually happening in the business.

About ten years ago I started out as a full-stack developer. At that time the split between backend and frontend was only beginning to take shape. Why did it appear at all? Because complexity was growing. Each side developed its own difficult specifics, and keeping all of that in one person’s head became harder and harder. Over time I specialized more in backend, in the server side. Then, as products grew, I became more involved in architecture, thinking through how everything should be organized, doing team lead work, and actively participating in processes inside the team and in collaboration between teams.

Since January of this year I have been diving much deeper into agent-based programming. And now I once again feel like a full-stack developer. My technical capabilities have grown dramatically. I am no longer afraid of building UI products in React. Before that, I was simply too lazy to dive deeply into it: my serious immersion in frontend had ended back in the jQuery era. I understand the general principles, but I did not want to spend time learning the modern tools. Now, to a large extent, that is no longer necessary. What matters most is being able to formulate tasks clearly for the agent, understand what result you want, and see potential bottlenecks and problems in advance. That is why a broad technology horizon has become much more important now.

The whole point can be summed up in a very simple phrase: we live in an amazing time. Our profession is changing, and we are changing with it.