Agentic coding moved my bottleneck. It used to be typing. Now it is reading.
For ten years the slow part of building software was writing it. You knew what you wanted. Getting it into the editor, wiring the imports, fixing the typo on line 40, that was the grind. Agentic coding flipped it. I run a fleet of coding agents overnight. They open pull requests while I sleep. The writing is basically free now. The reading is not.
What actually changed for a solo dev?
The agent does not get tired at 11pm. It does not skip the boring file. It will happily produce 600 lines across nine files for a task that needed 40 lines in one. The output is fast and it is plausible. Plausible is the trap. Plausible code compiles, passes the happy-path test, and reads fine on a first skim. It can still be wrong in a way that costs you a week.
So the work shifted. My job is no longer "make the change." It is "decide if this change is correct, minimal, and safe to merge." That is a reading job. It is a judgment job. And it does not parallelize the way writing does. Five agents can write five PRs at once. I can only really review one at a time.
