alt Hacker News> what if the most important professional “developer skill” to learn or improve is how to effectively use coding agents?
Well, it's not. There's a small moat around that right now because the UX is still being ironed out, but in a short while able to use coding agents will be the new able to use Excel.
What will remain are the things that already differentiate a good developer from a bad one:
- Able to review the output of coding agents
- Able to guide the architecture of an application
- Able to guide the architecture of a system
- Able to minimize vulnerabilities
- Able to ensure test quality
- Able to interpret business needs
- Able to communicate with stakeholders
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None of those things will be necessary if progress continues as it has. The AI will do all of that. In fact it will generate software that uses already proven architectures (instead of inventing new ones for every project as human developers like to do). The testing has already been done: they work. There are no vulnerabilites. They are able to communicate with stakeholders (management) using their native language, not technobabble that human developers like to use, so they understand the business needs natively.
> Able to review the code output of coding agents
That probably won’t be necessary in a few years.
I think you're agreeing with him. All of the things you just listed are key senior developer skills.