One of the things I enjoy most about AI coding agents is how much easier they’ve made it to show work that would have stayed hidden before. Quick visualizations, one-off tools, and small interactive demos are suddenly worth building because they only take minutes. As a result, presentations have become much more lively. We end up discussing something tangible instead of imagining it!

Generally, I’m a big fan of a show and tell culture instead of endless discussions about abstract ideas. People should feel comfortable showing incomplete work, know it’s okay not to be great at presenting, and be proud of small achievements. Coding agents make this easier than ever before.

I’ve noticed that with AI-assisted coding, it’s becoming even more common to end up with large PRs. This is problematic for several reasons:

• bugs are harder to spot
• merge conflicts increase
• reviews take longer

The interesting thing is that AI coding agents are also really good at splitting large PRs into smaller, more manageable pieces! I’ll often ask an agent to identify independent changes, separate refactors from functional changes, and suggest a sequence of smaller PRs.

To me, this shows that AI-assisted coding isn’t just about producing more code in less time. It can also help reinforce good engineering practices, which are necessary if you want to scale development over time.

One of my favourite new tricks is to be a little more verbose in Slack and then use Claude and Slack MCP to generate a pull request from the discussion. That way, ideas from our Slack discussions make their way into the product almost immediately!

It’s a small example of how software engineering is becoming less about producing code and more about collaboratively shaping the product.