Changing My Tune On AI

April 25, 2026

agentic development

From Skeptic to Builder

I went from meh to wow probably in a week. AI is coming or its here whether we like it or not and I wanted to make sure I could use it to build something, not just ask it questions. I had a side project idea that would be helpful to me and other managers on my team, but I usually don’t have time to work on tools. But leaning on AI for this project I can really see the power of agentic development.

Enter Github Copilot. For this project, I really cared about getting to an end result, not solving integrations with third-party tools or grid layouts. I need a website that lets me monitor repos and cloud resources that my teams own. And this was a great opportunity to work on a process to talk to AI. I didn’t just want to chat with it and say, create a portal that I can use. I wanted to take a vision from a stakeholder (me) and have the AI team take a project through a software development life cycle but at AI speed.

It worked, I have a portal that the rest of the managers on my team can use and I’m pretty happy with my MAS (Multi-Agent System) and “their” workflow. It was nice refining details and making sure requirements and specs were great, then saying go work on these parts while I go to this meeting.

Initial Thoughts On Using AI For Development

I have to admit when my company started pushing AI, I thought it was cute, but saw it as a helpful tool, a replacement for Stackoverflow — something that was going to take 10 minutes of googling down to 1 minute of chat.

Though that is true, you can definitely cut out Chrome or Edge from your workflow. That is a very small piece. I expect that kind of usage from new engineers that are still trying to grasp how to do common tasks, but for more experienced engineers, that isn’t enough to be excited about or to really drive this 10X everyone has been talking about.

What could 10X really mean?

Shifting Left

10x could be doing all the things we don’t have time to do today or the things we probably should be doing, but we’re too busy shipping applications to prod.

  • Are you married to writing unit tests? I personally love unit tests those have been a lifesaver for me for a long time, but not everyone feels that way. Create a custom agent that looks for gaps in new code. Not just coverage but appropriate tests.

  • What other tests are you not doing? Integration, e2e, load testing, automated UI tests, benchmarks? Are we at 10x yet?

  • Are you and your QA team not on the same page, do you hear about new test scenarios after you already merged? Why not have a QA agent?

  • Do you want to pass code review first try, code review agents that build off feedback from your whole team?

I’m sure there are many other things we can pull left all the way into our local development environments. Still delivering the same work, but at elite levels of engineering.

Shifting Right

To extend the metaphor of shifting post development activities Left. Let’s shift everything that happens prior to development to the development team. Shift pre development right. You could also say this is shifting development more left towards the stakeholders or people that need our help.

I’m not sure what has happened over the last few years, but it seems like there is a lot of process and roles added before software development can begin. And the distance between developers and stakeholders has gotten longer and longer. Product Managers, Product Owners, Program Managers, Project Managers, User Research. If the development team has questions its like playing a game of telephone to get answers. The business is so worried to spend development time on the wrong thing, but we’re spending time analyzing what is the right thing to build.

Let the software team or an architect sit in the room with the stakeholder, record the meeting, transcribe everything. Hey PO agent, let’s build the user stories and acceptance criteria and describe any product visions to the UX Designers so they can build what it looks like. Let the engineers talk to the end user that has a problem that needs solving, not through layers and layers of non-technical people. I believe with agentic development, the code part will become the cheapest part of software development. Where we will need to focus is how to translate a vision into actionable tasks for our new AI friends.

Maybe 10X is reducing complexity in the software organization.

Final Thoughts

I can see how AI can pull everything back to software development instead of the development process being so spread out and having so many steps. I encourage everyone to build your MAS that helps you do all the things you don’t have time to do, all the things that add friction, and all the things that help you as a software engineer become a high caliber elite engineer.

I recommend diving in and trying to build something from scratch with AI. Don’t chat and prototype with it build out requirements, create multiple agents that do different things, give it direction and feedback, give it architectural direction and constraints. If you are a software engineering manager or architect. Treat it like your team and how you would work with them.