Engineers as Orchestrators in Multi-Agent Systems

Anthropic released a report of the most important ways coding is being transformed in 2026: 1. engineers are becoming orchestrators, not just coders. the role is shifting from code, to managing agents, verifying their outputs, and designing architectures. 2. single agents → multi-agent systems. solving tasks sequentially is turning into teams of agents working in parallel. 3. Agents are moving from minutes-long tasks to days-long autonomous work. 4. AI coding isn’t fully autonomous yet. the benefit is in the increased output volume (more features, more bugs fixed, more experiments). 27% of AI work is tasks that wouldn’t have been done at all otherwise. 5. agentic coding isn’t just about software teams now. legal, sales, marketing, and operations are using agents to build their own tools