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I don't think the job has fundamentally changed, really, judgement about what's worth doing has always been the most important thing for most work.

I think people are continuing to undervalue craftsmanship as well, like they have for the entire history of software engineering.

I didn't say the change would be good! I do think it's a tool that will empower good engineers to be even better, and conversely people who weren't careful before are going to become that much more dangerous going forward, for exactly the reasons you just said

I'm also not even convinced that these are yet "indispensable" and that engineers must adapt-or-die here. I see a lot of excitement but the velocity increase does not seem like it's sustainable, especially when you factor in inference costs.

I remember being told this about adopting IDEs but I used vim for a very, very long time and only gave up due to some very specific out-of-the-box tooling my workplace had.

there's a happy medium where it speeds up solving development/maintenance/sysadmin problems a ton if you use it kinda like a search engine circa 2016 that almost always has a 60% good stack overflow post. certainly not as effective as a GOOD agentic engineer but uh not as destructive as a bad one