Coding agents - not chat-based AI - are the future of programming. They work autonomously through entire tasks while you watch, making chat coding obsolete by Q3 2025. The productivity jump is 5x at each wave.
Coding agents just changed everything about AI-assisted programming. We are not talking about code completions or even chat-based coding - those are already obsolete. True coding agents, launched after March 2025, work like having a supernaturally fast developer who grinds through entire tasks autonomously. You tell it to fix a JIRA ticket, and it fetches the ticket, examines your code, tracks down the bug, writes tests, and gets them passing - all without you copy-pasting or hand-holding through each step. The human is removed as the bottleneck for 90-99% of the work.
The progression is brutal and fast. Code completions were popular a year ago and are now dead man walking. Chat-based coding - what most people think of as vibe coding - is still rising but will become a dire fallback by Q3 2025. Each wave is conservatively 5x more productive than the last. Chat can be 5x as productive as manual coding, agents are 5x more productive than chat. By early 2026, developers will run agent fleets with AI supervisors managing groups of coding agents - one group doing bug backlog grooming, another working features, a third handling architectural migrations. Individual contributors will act like second-level managers, keeping work queues full across vast fleets grinding through enterprise legacy code.
The catch is simple economics. These agents work by throwing tokens at problems to explore the solution space, burning through fifties and hundreds like leafy green food. They require careful supervision and thoughtful problem selection - give them a task that is too big and they hurl themselves at it and get nowhere. They are ornery critters that need shepherding. But every iteration makes them easier to parallelize and more powerful. Companies still measuring Completion Acceptance Rate or thinking code completions are the primary way programmers use AI are sitting on a dinosaur-shaped curve sliding into obsolescence around 2027. The ones who make it will ride these waves, not get T-boned by them.
Check out the full stdlib collection for more frameworks, templates, and guides to accelerate your technical leadership journey.