> I can’t help but wonder whether constant use of “agent” harnesses will lead to an atrophy of the software engineering (or really any field) muscles.

Compiler evolutions really harmed how well software engineers understand or how often they have to drop down to assembly language.

Is that a problem for the 99% of developers around? Probably not.

I view LLMs as the next evolution. Some people will still need to care about the layer below, the shape of the code that is being written. But over time, just as it was with the transition from crafted ASM to higher level languages, the compilers became better, more efficient and trustworthy and I think the same will happen to LLMs, and we probably won't have to check the generated code as much, at least for most of the code around.

Is that a problem? Yes, for code that is intended to interface with humans (most of it still). The quality will probably become better and it won't be much of an issue.