I'm surprised by a lot of the commenters here. People that are saying just wait for all these codebases to crumble for us to be needed again refuse to acknowledge the reality of what is happening around us. If that is your take, I advise you to become really, really good at programming and work somewhere in the realm of critical infrastructure or financial institutions where presumably agent written code will be last to permeate.
I do get the sentiment but the conclusion doesn't make sense to me. We have been solving problems as engineers at different layers of abstraction for a long time. Pre-AI, I used frameworks that abstracted lower level concepts away which made it faster to develop the solutions that mattered (aka solving problems for the end user). I could, given enough time, write the underlying database adapter to convert my business logic form into a database query and back out but I didn't need to because someone else abstracted that part away. Did I know how well that adapter was written? No. Were there bugs in it? Occasionally you run into a limitation or bug the author hadn't considered that required a patch or fix. Going a step deeper, the programming language itself is an abstraction that compiles into machine code or bytecode. Do I understand machine code or kernels? Definitely not. Some programmers do, especially if you have a compsci background, but I'd wager the number has been decreasing over the years. The point is, now agents are writing code and they are now pretty damn good at it. Better than the "average" programmer out there. Now we get to "program" in natural language by telling the agents what we want and they get to worry about nailing the syntax and all those details while we focus on the higher level decision and direction of what's happening. If your agent written code is sloppy and terrible, that's a skill issue not an agents write bad code issue. You need to setup the systems that result in code to your standards with the checks and balances to test and QA appropriately before it hits production.
Complaining about the state of things while sitting back with your arms crossed refusing to adapt to this bold new world is a risky strategy. People saying just don't use AI and do your job as normal are also going to have a difficult time. The devs that can leverage AI effectively and get a lot done will out leverage you to the point where it doesn't make economical sense to keep paying you to not use AI (unless you are in one of those super critical fields I mentioned earlier and even then I'm not sure those are safe). Isn't it more fun to embrace this new technology and figure out how to use it effectively vs complaining and refusing to acknowledge it? Help shape the future instead.
I do get the sentiment but the conclusion doesn't make sense to me. We have been solving problems as engineers at different layers of abstraction for a long time. Pre-AI, I used frameworks that abstracted lower level concepts away which made it faster to develop the solutions that mattered (aka solving problems for the end user). I could, given enough time, write the underlying database adapter to convert my business logic form into a database query and back out but I didn't need to because someone else abstracted that part away. Did I know how well that adapter was written? No. Were there bugs in it? Occasionally you run into a limitation or bug the author hadn't considered that required a patch or fix. Going a step deeper, the programming language itself is an abstraction that compiles into machine code or bytecode. Do I understand machine code or kernels? Definitely not. Some programmers do, especially if you have a compsci background, but I'd wager the number has been decreasing over the years. The point is, now agents are writing code and they are now pretty damn good at it. Better than the "average" programmer out there. Now we get to "program" in natural language by telling the agents what we want and they get to worry about nailing the syntax and all those details while we focus on the higher level decision and direction of what's happening. If your agent written code is sloppy and terrible, that's a skill issue not an agents write bad code issue. You need to setup the systems that result in code to your standards with the checks and balances to test and QA appropriately before it hits production.
Complaining about the state of things while sitting back with your arms crossed refusing to adapt to this bold new world is a risky strategy. People saying just don't use AI and do your job as normal are also going to have a difficult time. The devs that can leverage AI effectively and get a lot done will out leverage you to the point where it doesn't make economical sense to keep paying you to not use AI (unless you are in one of those super critical fields I mentioned earlier and even then I'm not sure those are safe). Isn't it more fun to embrace this new technology and figure out how to use it effectively vs complaining and refusing to acknowledge it? Help shape the future instead.