Six Months of Writing Code Exclusively With Agents

After adopting a rule in February to stop writing code by hand, the author shifted from direct implementation to guiding AI agents through prompts, tools, testing, and environment design, finding that the change enabled more parallel work but created new coordination, validation, and security challenges. Early local multi-agent setups suffered from shared Git state, ports, processes, and dependencies, leading to isolated disposable VMs, automated environment provisioning, and botd, a remote, mobile-oriented system for managing agent tasks and preserving their conversations. The author allowed agents broad autonomy within isolated environments while restricting external access through read-only permissions, test-only write access, and credential proxies, emphasizing the risks posed by combining private data, untrusted inputs, and external communication. Agents were used not only for coding but also for customer-issue investigations, security testing, and deployment monitoring, though human judgment remained necessary to assess whether a technically correct change was worth shipping. The account argues for “agentic engineering,” in which humans define architecture, contracts, constraints, migrations, and validation before agents generate code, rather than accepting opaque AI-built systems through “vibe coding.” botd ultimately failed because its architecture had not been sufficiently understood, but its preserved SQLite data remained useful, reinforcing the conclusion that AI has changed the author’s work from iterating primarily on code to iterating on prompts, designs, and systems without eliminating the need for engineering responsibility.

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