2025 was the year of making coding agents work — figuring out what they’re good at, wiring them into IDEs, running them async, mostly in solo dev environments. Exploration phase.
2026 is about making them work better. The shift from “can I use this?” to “how do I scale this across a team?” That means:
- Spec-driven development becoming a standard practice, not a nice-to-have
- Agent-enablement platforms emerging with analytics and workflow optimization
- Deeper insight into coding workflows — understanding where agents help and where they create new bottlenecks
- Moving from individual experimentation to enterprise-scale deployment
The new bottlenecks
The interesting pattern: coding itself stops being the bottleneck. What replaces it:
- Code review — agents generate volume faster than humans can review it
- Documentation and engineering discipline — agents need maintained context to work well
- Organizational coordination — scaling agent workflows across large teams is a people problem, not a tools problem
- Validation — the review and verification process becomes the constraint
The decade of agents isn’t about making them smarter. It’s about making the systems around them reliable and scalable.
Originally posted on LinkedIn