Developers are shifting from traditional coding to AI-assisted coding, progressing toward full automation and orchestration of multiple agents within a codebase.

Skeptics will say agents make mistakes, but agent-plus-human collaboration consistently outperforms human-only development in speed, bug density, and feature throughput.

The evolution traces a path from AI in a browser to IDE agents, generating entire modules, and moving toward a terminal-driven workflow where agents handle diffs and changes.

Even with agents, human review remains essential to approve outputs and preserve judgment while delegating tedious implementation tasks.

The piece argues the AI paradigm should evolve from 'AI assistants' to 'agents' to unlock higher productivity in February 2026.

AI's broader impact includes faster ideation, experimentation, and iteration on product and creative goals beyond incremental code improvements.

Effective agent usage hinges on context-rich prompts, avoiding one-liners, providing agents with memory of the codebase structure and tech preferences, and ensuring human review to elevate judgment.

Emerging practices include managing multiple agents, using git worktrees, and possibly building an orchestrator to optimize token usage, with clear technical and workflow implications.

Concrete concepts include git worktrees and agents operating across IDEs and terminals, with ambitious explorations of frameworks and services like SvelteKit, Supabase, Resend, and PostHog.

Bottom line: treat AI as a 24/7 junior developer that learns from corrections; adapting workflows to delegate and orchestrate agents yields competitive advantage, while sticking to old AI-assistant notions leads to stagnation.

Assistant versus agent: an assistant waits for prompts, while an agent works asynchronously across steps and tools, implementing features, running tests, fixing issues, and creating PRs with minimal prompting.

Tone: advocate a proactive shift in mindset and workflow integration to leverage agents effectively rather than resist AI capabilities.