alt Hacker News#10 needs more emphasis than it receives. Cheaper code doesn't automatically lead to good product decisions.
Instead of focusing on whether you can build it, the scarcer resource becomes whether you should build it. And most teams lack a clear process for addressing this latter question. Requirements are collected in all sorts of places without ever being prioritized in an organized fashion. This is exacerbated by cheaper code. With cheaper code, you can release five times what you used to be able to release in a given period of time, but only if you knew which five products you needed.
For most teams, whether or not you can say no to building something is ambiguous at best, at least if you wish to stay on that team and at that company. It's definitely one of the things that has made me vote with my feet in the past. With agentic coding, the ability to say no is pretty much gone because the perception is that it's just one more parallel thing we can throw an agent at.
The thing I see from agentic adoption that I find lamentable as a software engineer is that timeline expectations have collapsed to absurdity. You can plan a project to do a major migration, do all the estimations on how long something will take, and if you give an answer that says weeks and cite the evidence, product and leadership will now claim it should take days, citing their ai's design.
It's exhausting. Even if you are an expert, you now have lost the implicit trust that came from years of building political capital, shipping efficiently, and delivering value for multiple companies, because a different prompt with different context from the one you provide gave a different answer than what you did.
During delivery, if you read your code produced line-by-line and review for correctness, and put in additional guardrail automations that slow the automated build, and ship 4 times a day with a defect rate of 5.4% with agentic coding, you are compared unfavorably to teams with a change defect rate of 15.7% that ship 13 times per day, because you are too slow.
And you are individually compared with whole team outputs. Even if you deliver at a rate ten times greater than the worst contributor at your company, if you are not outputting code at the rate of an entire team of 5, you are not meeting the expectations of product and leadership anymore.
All of this is to say, yes, people are looking at software engineers as both the bottleneck and unnecessary, even at high technology companies, right now. They are looking at them that way because they have their own agents that are biased to think that the engineering claims are wrong and agents are sycophantic.