Where Are You on the Agent Adoption Curve?
Audience: Developers already using Claude Code who want to gauge their current sophistication, not beginners starting from scratch (use the 30-Day Plan below for that).
Before picking a learning path, locate yourself. Nicolas Martignole (Principal Engineer at Back Market) proposed a 6-level maturity scale in March 2026 that maps well onto practical Claude Code usage. The levels below are adapted from his framework, with the upper half (3-5) being where most of this guide's content lives.
| Level | Profile | Signal |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Never used AI dev tools | Using chatbots at most, nothing integrated in workflow |
| 1 | Editor autocomplete | Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf, but no agent-level usage |
| 2 | External LLM, copy-paste | ChatGPT or Claude in browser, pasting code manually into editor |
| 3 | Claude Code basic user | Running Plan mode, simple prompts, reviewing everything manually |
| 4 | Stage delegator | Handing off full development stages (research, architecture, implementation, tests), writing less than 10% of code manually |
| 5 | Context engineer | Designing CLAUDE.md, sub-agents, custom skills, MCP servers, building the environment for agents to operate in |
| 6 | Orchestrator | Coordinating agent graphs, reinforcement loops, distributed agent systems |
Quick self-placement questions:
- Can you leave Claude Code running on a feature branch for 20+ minutes without checking in? → Level 4+
- Do you write CLAUDE.md before starting a project, not after? → Level 5
- Have you built a custom agent or hook in the last month? → Level 5-6
- Is your primary output prompts and system design, not code? → Level 6
If you landed at Level 3 or below: the 30-Day Plan below is the right path. If you're at Level 4-6: skip to Context Engineering, Agent Patterns, or MCP Ecosystem.
Source: Nicolas Martignole, "Découvrir les niveaux de maturité de l'adoption des coding agents", Le Touilleur Express, March 2026. Adapted and extended.