Cisco director of engineering on managing agents: I'm not working more, but work can feel more intense

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Sergio Freitas, senior director of engineering at Cisco, based in Lisbon, Portugal. His identity and employment have been verified by Business Insider. This story has been edited for length and clarity.

I started as a software engineer, became a manager, and currently work as a director of engineering at Cisco, with four teams based in Portugal.

Software engineering has always gone through changes. There are always new technologies you have to learn, like programming languages or frameworks. Now, it's the way engineers work that's changing rapidly, and in the last year, it's changed significantly. People have to adapt to that, and that can cause stress.

The biggest change came after frontier models launched at the end of last year, like Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5. That's when AI really started to be embedded in our workflows, and we began delegating and working with agents to do software engineering. We were using AI before, but more for autocomplete and prompting.

Agentic AI has changed our work

Our work as software engineers has changed from crafting the code to be focused on architecture, design, managing workflows and agentic orchestration. Engineers are shifting from manual work to becoming system architects and workflow orchestrators, allowing them to solve larger, more complex architectural problems.