Dedicated to all those who are sceptical about the significance of agentic coding, and to those who are not, and are wondering what it means for the future of their profession. The title is an homage to Zen of Python by Tim Peters. Unlike Tim, I am not a zen master. My only aim is to take stock of where we are and where we might be heading. I have been building with coding agents daily for the past year, and I also help teams adopt them without losing reliability or security.
Software development is dead Code is cheap Refactoring easy So is repaying technical debt All bugs are shallow Create tight feedback loops Any stack is your stack Agents are not just for coding The context bottleneck is in your head Build for a changing world When considering Buy vs. Build, the answer, more often, is build Fast rubbish is still rubbish Software is a liability, a product is an asset Moats are more expensive Build for agents Anticipate modes of failure
Software development is dead
You do not need to write another line of code if you do not want to. Coding agents can accomplish most coding tasks with the right direction.
Software development, as the act of manually producing code, is dying. A new discipline is being born. Your role in it is vital, but it is no longer centered on typing code. It is centered on framing problems, shaping context, defining constraints, and judging outcomes.
The marginal cost of code is collapsing. That single fact changes everything that follows.
Code is cheap
The economics of software have changed.
When coding is cheap, implementation stops being the constraint. You can build ten things in parallel. You cannot decide, validate, and ship ten things in parallel, at least not without changing the rest of the pipeline.
Cost of delay shifts. It is no longer about developer days. It is about time stuck in other bottlenecks: product decisions, unclear requirements, security review, user testing, release processes, and operational risk. Agents can flood these queues. Inventory grows. Lead time grows. Delay becomes more expensive, not less.
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