Kevin Surace explains that top developers now orchestrate six AI coding agents instead of writing code themselves. Their value shifted to strategy and customer goals, delivering finished features in hours rather than weeks. The best coders aren't coding anymore.
The best coders in 2026 aren't coding anymore. Here's what they're doing instead. We talk a lot about coding in AI today, and just in 2026, early 2026, we went from AI can help you a little bit with your code to AI writes the entire application, front end and back end, and you're done. And the first coders who tried, first thing they said is, but what am I going to do now? Like, this is what I do, I code. And what I said is, you actually got all the joy out of figuring out what the strategy was up front, what you're trying to achieve, and delivering the back end to that that customer, internal or external, that smiled and it goes, wow, that was fast. That's the joy. Everything in between was tedium. So that same coder today has 6 agents all coding for him, and he's become the robot overlord. And if he's meeting a customer at 11 AM and then goes to lunch with that customer, by the time they get back from lunch, he hands them the feature and says the feature is done.
