Engineering teams evolve from coders to orchestrators

What I like about "Conductors to Orchestrators: The Future of Agentic Coding" by Addy Osmani is that it treats orchestration as a responsibility problem rather than a branding exercise. If you take "coding's asynchronous future" seriously, you are not just wiring agents together, you are deciding where human judgment sits in the loop, which failures are acceptable, and who answers when the ensemble goes wrong.

Across domains you can already see outlines of that role. Accounting and finance pieces describe AI orchestrators who choose which tasks stay with human professionals and which go to specialised agents, then design the workflow that keeps everyone aligned. Workforce analyses talk about "collaborative intelligence" and new orchestration heavy roles for middle managers, while other writers argue that the only non negotiable skill in this environment is radical critical thinking, the willingness to interrogate every confident output instead of outsourcing your judgment.

So the interesting move here is not "AI replaces coders", it is "AI forces coders to choose whether they want to be executors or stewards of complex systems". If you pick stewardship, you have to care about latency, observability, security and ethics as much as clever prompts, because orchestration without those is just a nicer word for unmanaged risk. That is the thread this article pulls on, and it is where the real leverage of agentic coding will probably sit.

https://addyo.substack.com/p/conductors-to-orchestrators-the-future