The thing that often gets missed when thinking through the productivity gains that we’ll get from AI agents is all of the things that we’ll now be able to do that we didn’t do before. The greatest upside of AI agents is not just that you automate what you already do. Agents will let you tackle work and add new practices that you never wouldn’t gotten around to. In coding that may mean more testing, better security reviews, improved architectures, more features, and so on. But you can extrapolate this into all fields, whether it’s legal or finance or healthcare. The infinite abundance you get on knowledge work means so many areas of work become affordable now. If we look at back at how we work in 5 years from now, I’d guess that 90% of the tokens generated by agents will be on things that we didn’t do before as people.

It's not just unit tests - there are so many other top tier software engineering practices that accelerate productivity with coding agents Automated tests, comprehensive documentation, good version control habits, a culture of code review, quick deploy to staging environments...