I’ve written before about my computing origin story, and it’s still true. These boxes of sand, they can change the world, but only with the right programming. On its own, a computer isn’t even a fancy calculator. With software, it can be whatever it needs to be.

Who wouldn’t want to write software that could change someone’s life for the better? It’s still the dream.

I moved into management when I remembered that programming was a means to an end. I had become enamoured with programming as its own craft, but I knew I was never going to be that one programmer that you’d give an impossible problem to, only to have them come back two weeks later with a performant solution and a conference talk ready for you to help them edit. My interests are too varied for that.

I realised that I would be better placed to make computers do amazing things as a translator. As the engineer in the team who could speak Engineer, but also Product, Test, Metrics, Sales, Marketing, Economics, HR, Psychology, Productivity, Science, Design, Philosophy, and Pragmatism. I was the person who could go into a room of disagreement and come out with a plan that everyone got behind, not because I wrote it, but because I could help people cut away the distractions and focus on what they were all there for in the first place: getting things done.

I love aligning people, understanding their motivations and pointing them in the right direction. Watching as their enthusiasm for the work grows as we build and ship. Hearing their excitement when the thing succeeds, or helping them rediscover their grit when the thing fails. It’s a huge part of who I am.

But now? Now I have a legion of tireless engineers at my disposal. They produce pretty good code, exactly to spec, and their enthusiasm is boundless. They work all day, every day, and will never need an encouraging word or a frank conversation that makes us both feel rough for a few days afterwards. And not just engineers, but designers, product managers, security experts, sales and marketing teams, finance departments, operations. All there, ready for me to point them at the problem and to go get it.

And I stand here, with this limitless potential, paralysed.

See, every new disruptive technology has this effect: it shifts things in ways that are both obvious and subtle. The obvious change that these agents bring is that the cost of production – of simply producing things – rapidly drops towards zero. That’s obvious, and scary if you’re in the business of producing things in order to pay the mortgage.

But the subtle effect is that everyone gets to level up.

What does that even mean? Well, for those that haven’t made the transition before, it can feel utterly terrifying. It can make these coding agents seem new and weird and alien and like nothing we’ve ever seen before. And we get the fear. We try to find new words for them, and build out new tools, and treat them like new problems to solve.

But I think that’s missing the point. These are not new problems to solve, they’re just problems from the level above where we’re each used to sitting. Engineers don’t have to invent new ways to figure out how to use these agent swarms, they just now get to think like managers: what’s in the way of these swarms delivering what they need to? What’s unclear? How do I maintain quality when I can’t review all the code? How do I keep track of more work than I can store in my head? How do I think ahead to what problems we might be creating in the process of building?

These are manager problems, and we already have solutions, in practices, processes, and tooling.

And what about my problems. My paralysis? See, I’m very used to building a shared understanding of a problem, then working to produce a deliverable plan that everyone gets excited about. I’m not used to pulling those problems out of thin air (at least not the product problems).

My comfort zone is walking into the room, helping people figure out what problems they need to solve to win, and then rallying the troops to solve those problems with excitement and as much fun as possible.

But now I need to move to that level. I get to be the room with the problems.