In December 2025, Anthropic announced that Claude Code had reached one billion dollars in annualised revenue within six months of its general availability launch. The agentic coding tool, which lives in the terminal and can read, write, and execute code autonomously, had captured 54 per cent of the enterprise coding market. OpenAI's competing offerings held 21 per cent. The numbers signalled a fundamental shift in how software gets built. But the same month brought very different statistics. Veracode's GenAI Code Security Report revealed that 45 per cent of AI-generated code contained security vulnerabilities. GitClear's research documented an eightfold increase in duplicated code blocks since AI coding assistants became mainstream. And a rigorous study from METR found that experienced developers using frontier AI tools actually took 19 per cent longer to complete tasks than those working without assistance. These contradictory signals capture the essential tension of the agentic coding moment.…