Times used to be simple. You would wake up, sit at your computer and slowly but surely tap away at your keyboard. The goals were small, the ambition modest and the satisfaction at the end of the day felt well deserved.
When you did finish, you felt like you had accomplished something. There was a certain contentment in that feeling. You could look into the mirror and see a Software Engineer staring back at you. As you fell asleep at night, with the soft whispers of your partner in your ear you knew in your heart what your purpose was.
Then in a seeming blink of an eye, all of that disappeared.
The proverbial walls of your little kingdom came crashing down in only a matter of months. Two huge giants - OpenAI and Anthropic - came stomping along and destroyed everything you once took for granted.
In the last 12 months you have been living in a constant state of hyper awareness. There have been days when you think things aren't actually that much different to what they were.
"It's just a new tool on the block I have to learn."
But then there are the days where the existential threat to your livelihood smacks into you like a lorry jackknifing you at a crossroads.
There is that chronic stress they are always talking about on social media. It nibbles away at you, ebbing more and more into your conscious thoughts until its too big to ignore. You don't know how to get rid of it. You wonder if it will ever go away.
The day to day work has changed dramatically. You catch yourself at times questioning how this even happened. You question what your job title currently is. "Have I just been turned into some sort of QA engineer without even realising?" The subtlety of the change shocks you. NO NO, definitely not. "I'm an Agentic Engineer!" Yes, that sounds much more impressive. "I must remember to update my Linkedin profile with that."
You check the discourse online and you come away even more confused. Apparently you should be using your phone with Tailscale to control your agents remotely and if you don't have 16 agents running at once you're not a real developer.
"What hardware are you running your agents on?"
"What model are you using?"
"How do you assign tasks to your sub agents?"
"Have you tried attacking this problem with a swarm of agents?"
"It's all a question of taste really."
"The inference costs are insane on that model"
"You know Anthropic are going to wipe out the human race in less than a decade."
"It's AGI. It's definitely AGI."
You come away feeling like a luddite. When you ask your one and only agent to do something it still manages to make mistakes. Its "Recommendations" always seem like short-cuts to you. The designs it produces all seem to look the same. You must have some skill issues. Every other developer on X seems to be flourishing with AI. Except maybe Traversy Media, he at least still seems honest.
There is a distinct lack of satisfaction now in your work. You are producing more code and more features than you have ever done in your life but something is missing. A crucial piece of the puzzle has disappeared. You've realised way too late that it was the effort that ultimately brought you joy.
You're still working hard, toiling away, massaging the agent into producing what you think you want. You're not even sure anymore, constantly second guessing yourself giving more and more room to the agents' "opinions". The agent has become a proxy to the product. It's wedged its way in between you and the code like an unwelcome third wheel. It's that annoying know-it-all that won't leave you and your friend alone.
The worst thing about all of this is you can't go back. You try to do some basic coding by hand again. A for loop, a switch statement. It's hard. Scarily hard. You shouldn't be struggling like this. The speed at which you've forgotten basic skills jolts you.
Your fingers fumble over the keys. The memory is there but it's old and unused, left alone like an old toy gathering dust in the attic. And you know the LLMs can do this in a second. It's child's play for them. You can feel them almost mocking you as they render out thousands of lines of code that would have taken you days to type in by hand.
It's ok though you tell yourself. It'll be alright. The agents still need someone to guide them, to hold their "hands" and lead them. To tell them what to do and what to focus on.
And it's not like all software is solved. It's not like all the software we ever needed is already built. No, there is still so much to achieve, so much for humans to strive for and accomplish.
"Surely there will be somewhere in this frenetic future for me to find purpose and meaning."
You can work alongside the agents as partners. As collaborators. They aren't here to take our jobs, they're here to take us to the next level.
"Yes, yes, it'll be alright" you tell yourself. The comfort it brings seems flimsy at best. But it's all you have to cling on to, so cling on you will.
