The 2025 holiday break was supposed to be slow. It has been a long year of hard work and I needed to take a break.

My parents are older now. Cruises are their speed. Elevators instead of staircases. Early dinners. My dad triple-checking the daily schedule like it’s a mission briefing. My mom insisting we all order dessert because “it’s free”.  Time feels different when you realize there are fewer of these trips ahead than behind.

I told myself I would unplug. I even announced it at dinner the first night. “No laptop this week.” My dad nodded approvingly. My mom smiled like she didn’t quite believe me.

I didn’t last very long.

On the second afternoon, I slipped away with my laptop and headphones and found a quiet spot at the back of the boat. Espresso in hand. Salt air hanging thick. The low mechanical hum of the engines vibrating through the deck. The wake trailing behind us like a white scar across a blue horizon.

I opened my terminal.

I started catching up.

Claude Code, Claude 3.5 Sonnet. GPT-4.1 and GPT-4o. Early Codex CLI previews. Terminal-native agents gaining traction. IDEs that no longer just suggested code but executed meaningful chunks of it. Parallel task execution in the cloud. Multi-step tool use that didn’t collapse after the second function call.

At first, it felt like noise. 2025 had trained us to expect noise. But then I started testing.

I delegated something non-trivial. It finished. Cleanly.

I handed off something messier. It reasoned through it. Returned with structure.

I felt that strange combination of excitement and unease — the same feeling I had when I was working on code complete and refactoring in Borland JBuilder. Felt like magic.

This wasn’t incremental improvement.

Something had crossed a line.

The Delegation Threshold

There is a moment in any technological system when progress stops being additive and starts being structural.

The iPhone wasn’t merely a better phone — it reorganized behavior. AWS wasn’t cheaper hosting — it changed who could start a company. ChatGPT didn’t just answer questions — it altered how people thought about knowledge itself.

Over the final months of 2025, engineering crossed a similar boundary.

I call it the Delegation Threshold.  The point at which models become reliable enough to safely delegate meaningful work.  Not perfect. Not autonomous. Not magic.  But dependable enough that you stop hovering over every output.  Before the threshold, AI assisted me.  After the threshold, I found myself assigning work.  That subtle shift — from helper to delegate — reorganizes the system.  It reorganized me.

When Delegation Becomes Real

Individually, the releases were impressive.  Long-context windows that could actually be trusted. Tool use that didn’t unravel after the second function call. Parallel execution that made decomposition practical instead of aspirational. IDE-native agents that moved from autocomplete to autonomy.  Collectively, they crossed a reliability boundary.  When you can hand a model a non-trivial task and reasonably expect it to finish, you stop thinking in files.  You start thinking in systems.  Tasks decompose differently. Parallelism becomes natural. Orchestration becomes the new bottleneck.

The wildly stupid term “vibe coding” was making way for “agentic engineering”.

The scarcity shifts.

Code is no longer the constraint. Judgment is.

That realization didn’t feel triumphant.

It felt destabilizing.

Grassroots Discovery

What fascinated me most wasn’t the press releases.  It was what developers started doing once delegation became viable.  Recursive loops appeared — bash scripts feeding output back into models until the system converged. What looked chaotic was actually a crude form of evaluation harnessing.  

How our brains work was surfacing in the methods being discovered.

Agent swarms emerged — one human intent spawning multiple concurrent threads across files, features, and research tasks.  I tried it myself.  It was messy. Threads collided. Context drifted. One agent confidently refactored something another agent had just rewritten.

And yet — it worked often enough that you couldn’t ignore it.

When delegation becomes safe, orchestration becomes the craft.

The community was rediscovering harness engineering before it had a name.

A Collective Synchronization

Why did it feel sudden?

Because thousands of engineers had something rare during that break: uninterrupted time.

No sprint planning. No performance reviews. No backlog theater.

Just space.

Space to test. To push. To hand something real to a model and see if it came back intact.

When everyone returned, the tone had changed.

Group chats weren’t debating whether agents were useful. They were debating how to structure them.

The tools hadn’t just improved. The collective mental model had updated.

The Structural Repricing

When early 2026 reports began quantifying adoption curves and productivity deltas, the data validated the intuition.  Agent usage wasn’t experimental anymore. It was habitual.  I felt it in my own workflow. Tasks I would have blocked off half a day for were now something I delegated while I thought about architecture. And then came formalization.  OpenAI described building a product with near-zero human-written code. Engineers we ren’t typing implementation — they were designing constraints, evaluation loops, and execution environments. Harnesses.

That word stuck with me.

Harness.

Not autopilot. Not replacement.

Harness.

This is what happens after a threshold crossing.

When execution becomes cheap, environment design becomes expensive.

Feature velocity stops being durable advantage. System durability does.

The SDLC Inverted

We like to say we sped up the Software Development Lifecycle.  But sitting on that cruise ship, watching agents complete tasks while my parents took a nap, I realized that wasn’t quite right.

We didn’t speed it up.

We inverted it.

The old world moved in phases: requirements, design, code, test, deploy.

The new world begins with intent and harness design. Agents execute. Evaluation runs continuously. Humans orchestrate and judge.

Phase boundaries blur.

Code stops being the bottleneck. Evaluation and architecture take its place.

That isn’t speed.

That’s reorganization.

The Identity Question

This is the part I keep coming back to.

If writing code is no longer the center of gravity, what is?

I learned to love engineering by writing it line by line. By debugging at 2 a.m. By feeling the satisfaction of something compiling cleanly after hours of friction.

What becomes craftsmanship in a world of delegation? How do junior engineers learn the texture of a system if they rarely touch its internals? Where does pride migrate?

Delegation changes identity, not just workflow.

Every structural shift does.

What Comes Next

Crossing a threshold does not eliminate constraints. It relocates them.

Orchestration complexity can explode. Evaluation can become the new choke point. Reliability can plateau.

But thresholds, once crossed, rarely uncross.

The genie isn’t the story.

The threshold is.

And once crossed, systems reorganize themselves.

On that cruise ship, I closed my laptop and went back inside. My dad sent me a text and asked if I was done working.

“Yeah,” I said.

But I wasn’t done thinking.

We are still early on this journey.

Let’s go.