alt Hacker NewsI can't think of any use case for AI that is a necessity for myself (or people I know), even if coding agents (which I use every day) disappeared tomorrow it would only be a minor inconvenience that I had to write my own code again. Now lets contrast that with electricity or internet, if either of those went offline I would be on a call trying to get them restored asap, now as far as I know neither of those industries bring in $6T in revenue.
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If agentic coding isn't dramatically changing your productivity you're getting left behind. There's a clear difference between vibe coding and AI assisted software / systems engineering from how I think about things. With AI you can be massively more productive. I do a lot of things beyond code and this is what I've built in 2026 (quick snip from scc, it has proper excludes for node_modules and other pulled in deps that I didn't build) from ~code/ on my dev box:
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Language Files Lines Blanks Comments Code Complexity
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
TypeScript 10,705 2,445,724 191,695 71,737 2,182,292 167,330
JSON 1,435 604,218 58 0 604,160 0
Rust 1,260 718,912 56,372 57,773 604,767 65,562
Markdown 1,087 162,160 36,375 0 125,785 0
SQL 1,046 129,795 6,142 7,389 116,264 1,344
Python 705 168,359 22,710 23,235 122,414 17,962
JavaScript 657 209,397 8,824 7,587 192,986 45,383
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Total 19,009 4,903,248 353,289 186,252 4,363,707 326,094
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Estimated Cost to Develop (organic) $179,262,721
Estimated Schedule Effort (organic) 98.79 months
Estimated People Required (organic) 161.19
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Processed 206,138,543 bytes, 206.139 megabytes (SI)
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
I think most people would not continue to code if their coding agents stopped working, just like if the internet went down.
I agree its not on the same level as the internet/electricity but its been quite a lot more impactful than you are giving it credit for, and that has only been increasing over time.