The Rise of Full-Stack Development in the Age of Agentic Coding
Dinko Marinac
Intro
For a long time, I avoided calling myself full-stack.
Not because I couldn’t work across the stack, but because the term became meaningless. It didn’t describe how someone worked anymore. It mostly described a hiring shortcut: “We want one person who does everything.” Which usually meant nobody really owned anything.
Teams were split into backend, frontend, mobile for a reason. Specialization felt like progress. And to be fair, it was.
What actually broke full-stack wasn’t technical complexity. It was coordination.
Handoffs. Context loss. Waiting.
Why I was obsessed with single-stack setups
I used to push hard for single-language stacks.
Not because they were elegant. Because they were practical.
When everyone uses the same language and similar tools, things get simpler in very boring but important ways. You don’t spend half your time explaining how things work. People can read each other’s code. Changes don’t bounce between teams. You think more about the product and less about glue.
That’s why things like Flutter + Serverpod, Ktor + KMP, or React across web and mobile made sense to me. They weren’t magic. They just removed friction.
At the time, that felt like the ceiling.
Then agentic coding tools showed up
Tools like Claude Code didn’t suddenly make everyone a 10x developer. What they did was more subtle.
They removed fear.
Fear of touching the backend if you’re “frontend”.
Fear of breaking things you don’t fully understand.
Fear of leaving your lane.
When an AI understands your codebase, follows intent, and explains what it’s doing, the stack stops feeling like a hard boundary. You still need judgment, but you’re not blind anymore.
And that changes behavior.
People try things they wouldn’t try before. They move across layers instead of waiting. They learn while shipping instead of learning in isolation.
Less coding, more thinking (and that’s not always fun)
This doesn’t mean engineering gets easier.
It means the easy parts disappear first.
Boilerplate, wiring, repetitive patterns — gone or heavily reduced. What’s left is deciding what to build and why. That part is harder to fake.
Early teams will be smaller. They’ll move faster with fewer people. Hiring will be delayed.
Later, hiring will happen again, but expectations will be higher.
And yeah, juniors and mids are going to feel this. Not because they’re bad, but because “I can implement tickets” isn’t a strong signal anymore.
Outsourcing is going to feel this hard
Generic dev agencies are going to have a rough time.
If fewer people can do more, “we provide a full team” stops being compelling.
Freelancers, on the other hand, get an opening, but only if they adapt fast. Not by pretending to know everything, but by owning problems end-to-end and using tools like Claude Code without turning their brain off.
This rewards people who think in systems, not tasks.
Conclusion
This isn’t a return to the old “I do backend, frontend, DevOps, and design” nonsense.
It’s quieter than that.
Fewer people.
Broader ownership.
More responsibility.
AI doesn’t make you a senior engineer. But it removes a lot of artificial barriers that never really helped anyone.
Full-stack isn’t making a comeback as a title.
It’s coming back as a way of working — whether we call it that or not.
P.S. If you need a full-stack developer who can work across backend, frontend, and mobile without the usual hand-offs, feel free to connect with me on and LinkedIn and I’ll take it from there.