AI Coding Agents for Production-Grade Software

By Alex Chen — April 22, 2026 I ship production software with AI coding agents every day. Not toy demos, not weekend hackathons — actual systems that handle money, user data, and uptime commitments. Over the last eighteen months the tooling has gone from "cute autocomplete" to "can own a feature end-to-end if you set it up right." The gap between those two outcomes is almost entirely how you structure the work. The models are plenty capable now. What separates teams who ship reliably from teams