“The barrier to creating software has genuinely dropped. That is not hype. What it means for professional engineers is not that their skills are less valuable, but that the skills that matter have shifted up the stack, as they have in every previous transition.
The developers who thrived after the move from assembly to C were not the ones who could write the most clever assembly. They were the ones who understood what the machine needed to do and could express that intent clearly in a higher-level language. The developers who thrived after the move to managed languages and frameworks were not the ones most resistant to garbage collection. They were the ones who saw the freed-up cognitive capacity as an opportunity to solve harder problems.
The developers who will thrive in the agentic era are the ones who understand this as another step in the same arc and invest accordingly. Not in resisting the tools. Not in deferring to them uncritically. In developing the judgment, clarity, and systems thinking that make the tools maximally effective.
That means writing better specs. Investing in test infrastructure. Developing genuine architectural understanding rather than surface familiarity. Building the taste to evaluate output rigorously. Practicing problem decomposition until it becomes second nature.
The era of programming as primarily a keystroke activity is over. The era of programming as primarily a thinking and judgment activity has been accelerating for decades and just shifted into a higher gear.”
#AITransition
#
https://addyosmani.com/blog/factory-model/
@aral@mastodon.ar.al
