THE AGENT WRANGLER

I've been noticing a shift in how I work. Less time writing code line by line, more time orchestrating agents that write code for me.

The job is starting to feel like being a cowboy managing a herd. You kick off five or six Claude or Cursor agents on different parts of a codebase, then spend your time checking in on them, course-correcting when they drift, merging their work together. The skill isn't typing faster. It's knowing which agent to trust with which task, when to intervene, and how to keep the whole herd moving in the same direction.

Some engineers I know are running ten agents simultaneously. The bottleneck becomes attention management and context switching between different streams of work.

This changes what it means to be a software engineer. The craft shifts from implementation to supervision, from writing to reviewing, from doing to directing. Whether that's a loss or a gain probably depends on what you loved about the job in the first place.

I wonder what the senior engineer of 2030 looks like. Maybe less like a master craftsman and more like a ranch foreman who knows exactly when to let the herd run and when to pull them back.