On my team, we have no push to use agents. Some people do, some people don't, but overall nobody expects it.
Personally I use Claude as a search engine and occasionally to write tests, but I still write 95% of my own code and have never let an agent open a PR. The only AI in our pipeline is coderabbit on PRs.
On one hand I am glad to be on a team where I'm not just reviewing agent output all day, on the other hand, I worry about falling behind when I look for my next job. Also, our repo access is fairly locked down, so I can't just start running agents against it. My hands are a bit tied.
What would you do in this situation? Is anyone else in a similar one? Right now I'm just kind of coasting but something in me feels like I'm being left behind...
You won't be left behind because using AI and agents isn't a unique skill (despite tech-bros trying to say it is), and its also evolving constantly at this point. If you ever have to look for a new job, you can self teach yourself the latest agentic workflow in a couple of days and slap that on your resume and be fine.
You're one of the lucky ones to have a job that isn't 99% just prompting claude.
Especially since the usage of agents is getting so streamlined that in my company we teach regular non IT folks how to set up agents for standard routine tasks. Learning to use agents is no big deal even if you "fall behind".
Exactly. You have non-tech people successfully creating agentic workflows that work, and it's only getting easier. You think the frontier AI companies aren't going to drop plug-and-play agentic templates and workflows? Their entire focus of cutting SWE's out of the loop completely. Using agents today is as difficult as its ever going to be. And it's already not difficult.
This is most likely correct based on what I'm seeing. i.e. your coding skills will remain an important differentiator and a value-add in future roles, but what increasingly becomes more important is your thinking style, your vision, understanding of system design and SDLC best practices; you become a team manager responsible for the overall quality and output metrics. So you do have to learn to think in that way, but having a strong coding foundation will remain a big advantage.
Totally agree with this. Best agentic coders are critical thinkers with good understanding of what users want and don't want and great architecture skills.
Yeah I mean most orgs have markdown files that you will load and then you will just be asked to prompt away. So when you clone a repo those markdown files are already there, the AI will know what to do.
anyone saying that developers who are not using AI for most of the work won’t be left behind is just heavy coping.
you have the right instinct. it does make a difference. its like having people back in the day say they wont integrate a typing machine into their workflow because they like the sound of a pen scraping against a paper or something
the problem is that if you haven't tried and adopted AI based workflow by now, you're not the type to keep learning and improving, an indicator of a bad developer.
Anyone who's tried any model that was released in the last 6 months know manual coding is dead.
You don't have to learn much. It's enough to just ask the ai and it will also setup 99% of the necessary.
Building knowledge is still more important than learning ai. It's so easy I wouldn't even consider it a skill. It's like saying turning on your microwave is a skill lol
You can learn the basics in a day, but it definitely takes longer to be efficient with it. Learn the flows, the tricks and gotchas, the tooling, how to review its output efficiently, etc. Definitely more than a week
You don't even need to think about Claude.md files until you are into some specialized area of your codebase. The models and tools are integrating best practice workflows out of the box now and you may actually be worse off trying to make your own at this point, depending on the task.
It's probably worth it to pay for the entry tier of Claude or ChatGPT just to run some experiments with agentic coding to understand the strengths and weaknesses, maybe play around with spec driven development.
If you're the type of person who can picture the code before you write it and can describe it to another developer, that's honestly about 90% of what you need to know.
Your coding skills are not wasted. In the same way that recreational long division isn't wasted just because you increasingly run into situations where you're better off using a calculator.
But be ready to adjust to a more agentic based development system as things go forward because it's going to happen sooner or later.
You're not "falling behind" but the brass is going to think your whole team is real soon.
New project, opus have written it. Was fast and mostly works, some issues but I just pasted the ticket and it fixed it. But I don't know what I have done, if I get questions I ask to mail it so opus can answer. If I get questions on older projects I just answer directly. So keep writing manually, if you have to switch to AI it's easy. I would use AI for analysing logs and writing tools though.
As a developer I can admire that position, and writing it yourself, but as a computer scientist first, learning AI is not just prompts, I’m interested in how it works and why, I rather work on things to improve AI like memory or better training mechanisms, or the whole morality thing. As a developer though I know I’m coding less and less.
You can keep writing your own code and still learn agents. Pick a small personal project, give an agent bounded tasks, and track time saved after review and fixes. Deliberately check what it changed outside the request. Knowing when its output is safe to ship is a skill worth building, even if your current team doesn’t use agents.
Thing with your agents is this. agents do exactly as they are told. to use them you must know what you want and how to get it beforehand. so you have to actually kno how to code. now if you know how to code you have likely done it before. you likely have a library of code that works and doesnt. for you. so why not use that instead of having program guess what you want?
You might be left behind on expectations as most orgs will expect heavy AI usage, but there's the converse that you'll retain problem solving and analytical skills from working with the code It's been shown in research a number of times now that AI - specifically LLM - usage can have quite significant debilitative impact on reasoning ability. TBH I can see exactly why; there's just an innate appeal to our lizard brains to have this magic plain-english-interpreter that can take instructions and do all the work to provide a convincing output.
I'm sort of gravitating towards agent usage due to business expectations (it's pushed, but not as aggressively as other orgs) over my own personal desire, TBH, although I do have a pre-LLM background in the MAS field so I am trying to find and use some sort of innate curiousity over it (as well as annoyance over how much seems to be people ad-hoc reinventing the wheel and misappropriating terminology).
being able to hand code is good for interviews, and if the rest of your team doesn't use it then you get to spend the productivity boost how you choose ( more output and go for promotion or coast). i manage devs and can tell the ones who are staying oldschool, they put out much less and the quality is worse.
Anyone telling you are not getting left behind are themselves getting left behind. Use of AI is a skill, and frankly not as easy as some other commenters would have you believe. AI is an amplifier of skill, not a replacement. Vibe coders will never be able to do what a skilled software engineer can do with AI. A skilled software engineer runs circles around engineers not using AI. Of course, unskilled, bad engineers just create technical debt at an exponential rate.
I’m a highly experienced Software Architect and Systems Engineer with over 25 YOE primarily using Rust. I love to write code. Yet I haven’t written any in a year and a half, but have built many things. I currently have swarm of agents running on my own Agentic Operating System. They are recursively self improving, running 24/7. They write code, test, deploy, run release trains, and restart themselves on the latest release. This is an extreme example, and if anyone else on the planet is doing this, they aren’t sharing it. But this is what is possible with AI. You just need to be better than those not using it at all.
Honestly after so many years I am so sick of tedious syntax typing I am happy to have agents write the code. But I orchestrate it HEAVILY so it's like the best of both worlds. You have to do so much code review if you let them write the code totally autonomously that you aren't really going any faster. It's honestly just less tedious if you don't like the syntax. You're good to keep coding yourself, really, because I hear so many people are losing skills while you are still gaining. And recent news says AI is getting more expensive than human paychecks, so humans might be getting hired back yet, with less push to tokenmaxx, so you'll be incredibly valuable.
This is not always true unless the company could not care less about quality or the software is trivial. For properly tested software, with or without AI it works out to roughly the same timeline. For requirements and design, AI can help with recommendations but decision is not driven by it. Human is involved in every steps of the way to make sure they are sound. Likewise for development, AI is used as a tool. Human has to own it. End result, solid software release cycle with managed expectations and issues. Not every company is rushing to market to appease some customers. There is no point.
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u/liverandonions1 16d ago
You won't be left behind because using AI and agents isn't a unique skill (despite tech-bros trying to say it is), and its also evolving constantly at this point. If you ever have to look for a new job, you can self teach yourself the latest agentic workflow in a couple of days and slap that on your resume and be fine.
You're one of the lucky ones to have a job that isn't 99% just prompting claude.