The buzz has been building on social media for a while, but I wanted to note my own personal tipping point: last week (January 12-16, 2026) I wrote the majority of my code using software development agents. Specifically, I used a combination of Claude Code and OpenCode, both with Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 model.

I think these tools are officially a clear productivity boost for me. As echoed by many others, they not only make it easier to do the coding I was already planning to do, but they also make unthinkable refactors or fiddly, one-off tasks feasible – tasks that would otherwise not be worth the time. Just one example: I spent 30 minutes adding an InquirerPy TUI to a non-interactive ETL tool, just to make managing pipeline metadata slightly easier (and more accessible to non-developers on my team). I had never used InquirerPy before, so it was the perfect kind of task for large language models: labor-intensive for me to do, but easy to describe and easy to verify.

I wanted to mark this moment because overall I feel a strong sense of dread. I worry about major disruptions to white collar work, I worry about losing my own job, and I worry that even if I’m okay professionally my day-to-day work will become more competitive, less engaging, and more unstable. While it’s an exciting time, the uncertainty is very unpleasant.

Hopefully, I’ll look back on this post in a few years and laugh at my fears. (LLMs will never capture tacit knowledge, right?) Until then, I’ll leave you with a few articles reflecting on the automation of intellectual work and the use of LLM coding agents.

Further reading

On displacement

On agentic coding