The new bottleneck created by coding agents is cognitive capacity — an individual engineer can generate code far faster than they can reason about it, so teams remain essential for load-balancing cognitive load.

Even though agents let a single engineer produce far more code, no individual can maintain oversight of 100x the codebase alone, so engineering teams are still necessary to distribute the cognitive burden. ✦ AI generated

Simon Willison · Simon Willison's Weblog · 2026-08-19 · original ↗

I can do way more work as a single engineer than I could without agents. So you could argue, why should a company have more than one engineer? Beyond the obvious bus factor thing — a team of one is a very badly designed team — the answer is that the new limiting factor is cognitive capacity. I can churn out code a hundred times faster. I don't have the cognitive capacity to stay on top of 100 times the amount of code. So you still need a team of engineers, so you can load balance that cognitive capacity across the team.

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