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Comment by lelanthran | Hacker News Reader

> but they probably see the state of the art advancing quickly so that companies who take a wait-and-see approach will be late to the game when AI is a substantial productivity enhancer.

This makes no sense for coding subscriptions. Just how far behind can you be in skills by taking a wait and see position?

After all, it's not like this specific product needs more than a single day for the user to get up to speed.

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I disagree, agentic coding is a very different skill set. When you are talking about maintaining massive corporate code bases it’s not a instant-gratification activity like vibe coding a small prototype, a lot of guardrails and frankly a new level of engagement in code review becomes necessary. Ultimately I think this will change the job enough that many folks won’t make the transition.

I totally agree - yes, the current AI tools will definitely change, but the difference in AI-tooling specifics is much smaller than the difference between "no AI assistance at all" and an agentic-AI heavy coding process.

And I say this as someone who didn't make the transition after 25 years as a software engineer. While I get a lot of value out of AI, I felt it largely changed my job from "mostly author" to "mostly editor", and I just didn't enjoy it nearly as much, so I got out of software altogether and went to violin making school.

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