Agents amplify expertise rather than replace it

AI coding tools multiply what you already know. A developer with strong engineering fundamentals gets multifold productivity gains; one without gets amplified confusion. The skills that matter most are the senior ones: system design, complexity management, knowing what to automate. Treat the agent like a high-leverage junior with tight specs and a reviewed diff every turn. This connects to comprehension debt compounds silently and friction in agentic coding is engineering judgment.

The inverse is also true. A developer who lacks the foundation to evaluate agent output gets amplified confusion: plausible-looking code that hides subtle bugs, inconsistent architecture across sessions, and a growing gap between what was generated and what is understood. The model writes with complete conviction, including nonsense, so the discriminating skill of reading code matters more than the generative skill of writing it. The people who get the most from agents are the ones whose judgment was already sharp before the tools arrived.