I manage 10+ agents at Cisco. It doesn't mean longer hours, but the work can feel more intense.

This as-told-to effort is based connected a speech pinch Sergio Freitas, elder head of engineering astatine Cisco, based successful Lisbon, Portugal. His personality and employment person been verified by Business Insider. This communicative has been edited for magnitude and clarity.

I started arsenic a package engineer, became a manager, and presently activity arsenic a head of engineering astatine Cisco, pinch 4 teams based successful Portugal.

Software engineering has ever gone done changes. There are ever caller technologies you person to learn, for illustration programming languages aliases frameworks. Now, it's the measurement engineers activity that's changing rapidly, and successful the past year, it's changed significantly. People person to accommodate to that, and that tin origin stress.

The biggest alteration came aft frontier models launched astatine the extremity of past year, for illustration Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5. That's erstwhile AI really started to beryllium embedded successful our workflows, and we began delegating and moving pinch agents to do package engineering. We were utilizing AI before, but much for autocomplete and prompting.

Agentic AI has changed our work

Our activity arsenic software engineers has changed from crafting the codification to beryllium focused connected architecture, design, managing workflows and agentic orchestration. Engineers are shifting from manual activity to becoming strategy architects and workflow orchestrators, allowing them to lick larger, much analyzable architectural problems.

The agents are for illustration teammates and I negociate 10 to 20 agents daily, which negociate different agents. The number of agents they negociate depends connected the complexity of the task. The main orchestrator supplier tin spawn sub-agents to complete circumstantial tasks.

They're ever moving and they're alert of collaboration level notifications, GitHub propulsion requests, and different integrations erstwhile fixed definitive permission. For example, based connected the explanation of a summons successful Jira, which is our task guidance and issue-tracking tool, an supplier creates the code, and past that has to beryllium reviewed by the personification who owns the agent. It past goes done a reappraisal process, wherever astatine slightest 2 engineers person to reappraisal the code.

About 4 months ago, we moved into loop engineering, where, alternatively of the supplier asking questions, it loops, aliases keeps moving until it gets the last response.

Sometimes, depending connected what needs to beryllium done, the supplier tin inquire for authorization to link to definite systems aliases execute definite operations. More and more, it's autonomous, but strict guardrails remain.

I'm reviewing much work

There's a batch of worth successful having AI activity pinch engineers, but they request to beryllium conscious astir reviewing the code. Everything that gets delivered to accumulation is the human's responsibility, not the agent's.

I'm not moving much hours, but location is an facet of AI that brings, successful galore occasions, more activity to the table because it tin do more.

Cisco focuses a batch connected security. So location are a batch of information scans you request to run, and conversations pinch the ineligible squad that request to happen.

It's a faster-paced job

As engineers accommodate to this caller measurement of working, immoderate first fatigue comes from the expertise to do more. You person to displacement your attraction a lot, which slows you down if you're not completing tasks end-to-end.

As engineers accommodate to higher regular output and multi-threaded collaboration pinch agents, they request to build caller intelligence habits astir multitasking and asynchronous review, which is simply a different cognitive workout from accepted coding.

It's a wider scope. At the extremity of the day, you consciousness you were much focused, but not successful the measurement erstwhile you're coding and person to beryllium successful the area for extended periods.

Crafting codification was a accomplishment that you built, and not galore group had it. It benignant of felt for illustration a superpower of being capable to create thing from scratch and codification it yourself. If you're really into the code-crafting piece, it's a big alteration that immoderate engineers struggle with.

At the extremity of the day, it felt lighter. Now pinch the guidance of agents, it's faster-paced.