alt Hacker NewsCode generation is cheap in the same way talk is cheap.
Every human can string words together, but there's a world of difference between words that raise $100M and words that get you slapped in the face.
The raw material was always cheap. The skill is turning it into something useful. Agentic engineering is just the latest version of that. The new skill is mastering the craft of directing cheap inputs toward valuable outcomes.
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Or another way of looking at it: just because digging a ditch became cheap and fast with the backhoe doesn't mean you can just dig a bunch of ditches and become rich.
Indeed: The act of actually typing the code into an editor was never the hard or valuable part of software engineering. The value comes from being able to design applications that work well, with reasonable performance and security properties.
Raising $100M doesn’t even mean you have a good idea or an idea people like or an idea you can even make money on.
I think we’re falling into a trap of overestimating the value of incrementally directing it. The output is all coming from the same brain so what stops someone just getting lucky with a prompt and generation that one-shots the whole thing you spent time breaking down and thinking about. The code quality will be the same, and unless you’re directing it to the point where you may as well be coding the old way, the decision-making is the same too.
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> The new skill is mastering the craft of directing cheap inputs toward valuable outcomes.
Strongly agree with this. It took me awhile to realize that "agentic engineering" wasn't about writing software it was about being able to very quickly iterate on bespoke tools for solving a very specific problem you have.
However, as soon as you start unblocking yourself from the real problem you want to solve, the agentic engineering part is no longer interesting. It's great to be solving a problem and then realize you could improve it very quickly with a quick request to an agent, but you should largely be focused on solving the problem.
Yet I see so many people talking about running multiple agents and just building something without much effort spent using that thing, as though the agentic code itself is where the value lies. I suspect this is a hangover from decades where software was valuable (we still have plenty of highly valued, unprofitable software companies as a testament to this).
I'm reminded a bit of Alan Watts' famous quote in regards to psychedelics:
> If you get the message, hang up the phone.
If you're really leveraging AI to do something unique and potentially quite disruptive, very quickly the "AI" part should become fairly uninteresting and not the focus of your attention.