> if the AI is writing all the code, what value am I bringing?
What wouldn't an average person off the street be able to do?
I think you're mistaking typing characters on a keyboard for coding. Designing a system is coding. Knowing what refactorings to do to ensure things evolve in the right direction is coding.
Being able to recall all the syntax has lost value due to AI, but designing and leading the feature development hasn't and that can't (yet) be trusted to AI.
I'm not too worried about keeping skills sharp - if I'm ever put in a situation where they become relevant again I'm confident I can just relearn them.
I have the agent grill me/ask me questions about what has been implemented, often on a fairly technical/granular level of the feature is important enough.This is obviously way slower than just vibing the whole thing and ticking off a passing test suite (that the agent also wrote). But I find that doing this has allowed me to retain most of my problem solving and reasoning skills (which have definitely atrophied).
People are kidding themselves thinking they fully understand what is going on at a deep level for 3-4 (or more) parallel tasks constantly context switching. It's also an anxiety-inducing way to work and has led to a proliferation of agent management tools enabling max efficiency.
Focusing on systems thinking/observability/knowing when NOT to build something/using agents to fix/learn new things quickly seem to be where I see devs still bringing the most value compared to any other cowboy.
imo the valuable thing we bring as software engineers is and has always been solutions to problems with the contextually correct quality/speed/cost tradeoffs. with agentic coding, these factors all shift and we're all in the process of recalibrating. namely the speed dial can now be shifted way down.
to answer directly, i live in claude code now. and while it's a different shape of daily work, i'm still engineering, still evaluating those 3 factors and figuring out how to triage and solve user-problems much faster than i could 5 years ago.
> if the AI is writing all the code, what value am I bringing?
What wouldn't an average person off the street be able to do?
I think you're mistaking typing characters on a keyboard for coding. Designing a system is coding. Knowing what refactorings to do to ensure things evolve in the right direction is coding.
Being able to recall all the syntax has lost value due to AI, but designing and leading the feature development hasn't and that can't (yet) be trusted to AI.
I'm not too worried about keeping skills sharp - if I'm ever put in a situation where they become relevant again I'm confident I can just relearn them.
I have the agent grill me/ask me questions about what has been implemented, often on a fairly technical/granular level of the feature is important enough.This is obviously way slower than just vibing the whole thing and ticking off a passing test suite (that the agent also wrote). But I find that doing this has allowed me to retain most of my problem solving and reasoning skills (which have definitely atrophied).
People are kidding themselves thinking they fully understand what is going on at a deep level for 3-4 (or more) parallel tasks constantly context switching. It's also an anxiety-inducing way to work and has led to a proliferation of agent management tools enabling max efficiency.
Focusing on systems thinking/observability/knowing when NOT to build something/using agents to fix/learn new things quickly seem to be where I see devs still bringing the most value compared to any other cowboy.
I heavily use browser based LLM for bugs I care about. Code that is close to business logic like SQL is all 'by hand'.
Frontend stuff for me, which I'm bad at, I let agents do all of and I test the end result.
Other things are in-between, but time wise it's probably mostly me writing code. Lines of code is the LLM for sure.
imo the valuable thing we bring as software engineers is and has always been solutions to problems with the contextually correct quality/speed/cost tradeoffs. with agentic coding, these factors all shift and we're all in the process of recalibrating. namely the speed dial can now be shifted way down.
to answer directly, i live in claude code now. and while it's a different shape of daily work, i'm still engineering, still evaluating those 3 factors and figuring out how to triage and solve user-problems much faster than i could 5 years ago.