March 14, 2026
Directing AI Agents: What I've Learned After Six Months
I stopped writing most of my own code about six months ago. Not because I wanted to — because the tools got good enough that it stopped making sense to do everything by hand.
Here’s what that shift actually looks like in practice: I spend more time reading code than writing it. I spend more time thinking about architecture than syntax. And I spend a surprising amount of time learning how to give clear, precise instructions — because the quality of the output is directly proportional to the quality of the input.
The biggest misconception I see is that AI coding tools are a shortcut. They’re not. They’re a different way of working that requires its own set of skills. The engineers who will thrive are the ones who learn to direct, review, and iterate — not the ones who refuse to change how they work.