Delegated Coding Has a Bright Future (blog.jenkster.com)

The piece argues that the current buzz around “Vibe Coding” has obscured a more useful framing: agentic AI will function like a team of junior programmers — brilliant at research and churning out work but weak on big-picture design and long-term thinking. Rather than celebrating ad-hoc prompts that produce seemingly working snippets, the real opportunity is “Delegated Coding”: treating AI agents as delegated contributors you decompose, supervise and integrate. That reframing cuts through hype and highlights who will benefit most: engineers who can architect systems, break features into small handoffs, foresee architectural debt, and enforce software hygiene like version control and CI. For the AI/ML community this matters because it changes workflows and skill priorities. Technical implications include the need for robust orchestration layers, task decomposition frameworks, rigorous testing/review pipelines, reproducible environments, and tooling to merge AI-produced artifacts into maintainable codebases. Delegated Coding promises huge productivity gains and scaled service delivery, but also increases risk of brittle, sloppily integrated systems if not guarded by strong architecture and governance. The takeaway: invest in delegation patterns, orchestration, and engineering practices — that’s where agentic AI will deliver the most reliable value.