A few multi-hour agentic coding sessions with Opus 4.6 in Claude Code have forced me to update my view on coding agents. With Sonnet 4, I had a sense of what tasks would be worth delegating to it, and what tasks it would struggle with so I might as well do them myself. That delineation has moved so much with Opus 4.6 that I have yet to encounter a task that made me think I would have been better off doing it myself. The role of the human programmer is different now.

The models are finally good

The Opus 4.6/GPT-5.4 class of models are dramatically less frustrating to work with compared to prior iterations. The amount of corrections, bug fixes, and follow up tweaks required on the output is much smaller than earlier LLMs. In November of 2025, I wrote that I didn't think the profession of software engineering was forever changed quite yet. That opinion is really being challenged just a few months later. The percentage of programs where it makes sense for a human to type out the code is now tiny.

Mourning the craft

I felt a sense of loss after watching Opus 4.6 tackle a big programming task with minimal intervention from me. I have pursued expertise in the craft of programming for over a decade, and all of the sudden it no longer feels like a worthwhile pursuit. LLMs will likely be better at programming than most humans from this point forward.

Software engineering is still alive

The micro skill of programming is all but dead, especially in the domain of doing web development with popular programming languages. However, the macro software engineering skills of system design, architecture, and taste are still as critical as they have ever been. I don't expect the software engineering profession to disappear for a long time, but it's clear most of us will have to move to a higher level of abstraction. Understanding the level of abstraction below you is still important, and some engineers will still work on levels of abstraction below coding agents. With that said, I think coding agents will dominate the bulk of software development work going forward.