Tripwires

Everyone is making the same argument: code is no longer the bottleneck, and the bottleneck has shifted to the phases before and after coding. But describing this as a moving bottleneck understates the change. Beyond the agency and identity attachment challenges I discussed in my previous essay, agentic coding changes not just the volume of work but what it takes to judge, validate, and understand it. Over the past two months, I went full speed with agentic coding to tease apart some problems. I got the outcomes I expected—hope to share more about those later—but the work was often cognitively draining: I experienced decision fatigue, sometimes struggled to form a mental model of how everything works, and had to disconnect and step back multiple times. That experience taught me one thing: while agentic coding compresses the cost of certain aspects of the SDLC (researching, initial problem decomposition, prototyping, coding, testing and debugging, document production, etc.), it makes…