Every team moves along the same curve. It starts with Tab: low-entropy, keystroke-level suggestions. Then synchronous agents, where a developer directs the work in a prompt-and-response loop and stays in the loop at every step.

Autonomous cloud agents are the next step. Each runs on its own virtual machine, so you can hand off a task and move on. The agent works for hours, iterating and testing, and returns artifacts you can review instead of a session you have to reconstruct. The human role shifts from guiding each line to defining the problem and setting the review bar.

Most engineering time still goes to keeping the lights on: refactors, migrations, dependency upgrades, and flaky tests. Autonomous agents are good at exactly this kind of steady, well-scoped work.

As agents take on more of it, the balance shifts. Teams spend less time maintaining what already exists, and more of it on new products and the ambitious bets that were always waiting behind the backlog.