PostHog: Agent-Opened PRs Jumped From 20% to 70%, So What Do Engineers Do?
rseroter · x · 2026-09-17
PostHog's essay asks what engineers do once AI writes all the code. Over the last 4 months, agent-opened PRs in their monorepo went from 20% to 70%, breaking the definition of engineer as "someone who writes code" — yet Anthropic, which claims "coding is largely solved," still has 208 open roles with "engineer" in the title.
The piece identifies five areas of work:
- Monitoring: watching running agents, fixing errors, tracking dashboards and outstanding PRs; PostHog engineers built standup bots, repo summary scouts, PR monitoring setups, and anomaly alerts for this
- Setting direction on what's worth doing
- Deciding how to build and implement
- Evaluating agent results
- Improving the loop
Thesis: AI amplifies how much information engineers can process but also raises expectations; engineers shift to piloting the product loop rather than going extinct.
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