Coding Agents at a Startup

May 13, 2026

Personally, my own experience of using coding agents has been all over the place. Claude Code helped create a product prototype in minutes that would have taken me at least a week, and then a few minutes later it’s dripping over itself trying to import stdlib. It behaves like a hippie dev who is usually reasonably competent, sometimes takes … ahem… mind enhancers to achieve extraordinary leaps of logic that leaves me taken aback, and at other times, crashes from that drug-induced high to generate such ridiculously dumb conclusions that I’m left scratching my head.

There is no doubt software engineering has changed with the advent of coding agents. Here are some observations I’ve noticed.

AI increases prototyping speed

I used Claude Code to write a TypeScript UI without any prior experience. The docs reading and boilerplate that would have taken days just disappeared. However, this increase in speed and abstraction has some costs.

AI is changing engineering culture

There is less ownership over the codebase. Folks ship code without understanding why it works. When problems arise, they blame the coding agents.

AI can reduce collaboration

Folks tend to ask Claude instead of their teammates for understanding the codebase, for second opinions, for things that used to require a conversation.

AI amplifies skill distribution

AI amplifies both good and bad judgment. Strong engineers move faster and make better decisions. Knowing how to prompt and when to distrust the output has become a skill in itself.

The field is changing fast and can be exhausting to keep up. I find encouragement knowing that AI is just a tool and the hype will die down, and the useful parts that help us live better will remain.