Transcription
Here are eight levels to working with AI agents, and most developers are still on level one.
Starting at the bottom, you don't use AI at all. Then, you are approving every file change the agent suggests. Then, you get comfortable and let it run freely inside your IDE. Then, you stop reading every diff and start guiding it through conversation instead. That is where most people plateau but call it mastery.
But the real shift happens when you stop working in the IDE entirely and work with agents. The IDE becomes the place you check the output, not the place you work. Then, you run two agents, then five. Then, you realize manually managing ten agents is chaos. You start asking a different question entirely: What if one agent managed the others?
That is level eight, where you are not just writing code. You are writing the coordination layer that decides which agent does what, when, and why. Here is what most people miss: The higher you climb, the less you write code and the more you think in systems. I feel that the shift is not from human to machine. It is when you become an orchestrator and provide extra value to the company.