I don't type much code any more. Over the past year I rebuilt AEGIS, my own operations layer, into its third version, kept the Ansaar data platform running every night, and shipped most of the Hikmah Technologies site. Claude Code wrote most of the lines. Work I would once have planned in weeks now fits in days.
So where do my hours go? Almost none of them go on writing code. They go on three things:
- Finding out what the person actually means.
- Deciding what a correct result looks like.
- Checking what got built against the real world.
That is the job now. The agent handles the part in the middle.
The code was the easy part all along
For most of my career it didn't feel that way, because writing code was slow and took up the day. Whoever could write it was the expensive person in the room, and every other role was arranged around them.
Now a clear description turns into working code in minutes. Agents are also getting steadily better at the work after that: reviewing, fixing bugs, deploying. I expect them to get most of the way there. What I don't expect them to get is the description itself.
The knowledge isn't written down
Take a simple request: "we need a way to track our leads."
Hundreds of products fit that sentence. The right one for a property brokerage is not the right one for a software company. At a brokerage, the lead may be a family, not a person. The same buyer calls in through three channels. A site visit matters more than an email open. The rules about who "owns" a lead can decide whether the partners stay friends. Usually none of that is written down. The owner carries it in their head and would struggle to list it if you asked directly.
No model has seen it, because it has never been written anywhere. Someone has to sit with the business, pull it out piece by piece, and turn it into something exact enough to build. Then they have to show the result and hear "no, not like that", because the first version is always wrong in a way nobody could have predicted.
This also does not carry over from one client to the next. What "correct" means for one brokerage's leads is not quite what it means for the next. That is why off-the-shelf software grows a hundred settings and still doesn't fit. Cheap code makes it possible to build the version that does fit, but only if somebody has done the finding out.
This is the first part. The full post — including the rest of the working details — is on my site: The agent writes the code. I'm paid for the rest.
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