I manage 10+ agents at Cisco. It doesn't mean longer hours, but the work can feel more intense.
Sergio Freitas said that using agents to do more work results in more code that need to be reviewed by engineers.
Sergio Freitas, a senior director of engineering at Cisco, oversees a team of 10 to 20 agents daily. While he isn't working longer hours, the work has become more intense and fast-paced as AI agents have become more integrated into their workflows. The introduction of frontier models like Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5 has led to a significant shift in how engineers work, with more focus on architecture, design, and system orchestration.
Engineers are now shifting from manually coding to managing workflows and orchestrating agents, which are essentially AI-powered teammates.
These agents can create code based on project management tool descriptions, such as Jira, and then pass the code through a review process involving at least two human engineers. The agents are becoming more autonomous, but they still adhere to strict guardrails. Freitas emphasizes that while AI can streamline processes, the final responsibility for delivered code remains with human engineers.
The increased pace of work and the need to review more code can lead to a sense of fatigue, as engineers adapt to managing multiple tasks and asynchronous collaboration with AI agents.
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