Are we going to see more job postings asking for only agentic coding?

Question

Was perusing job postings today and saw this on a Zapier listing:"You work through AI agents, not alongside them. Your daily development workflow is built around directing and reviewing agent-written code, not writing it by hand. You have opinions about which models to use for which tasks, you've hit real failure modes and built mitigations, and your workflow is actively evolving. Bonus: you use multi-agent patterns, enable others on your team to build faster with AI, or have scaled AI impact beyond yourself."This took me aback a little as I don't think yet I have seen companies talking about hand-writing code being bad.Is this happening more often?

bediger4000 · Accepted Answer

I don't think we'll see much of this.For the time being, agentic coding makes 10x supermen out of existing medium and long-time coders. How much more code do we need, after all?Second, look at the rate of "AI" improvement. Agents will start writing themselves in a few weeks or months, then all the agent wranglers and LLM jockeys will become 100x supermen. Soon, humans won't be in the loop at all.The window in which one could become an agentic-only-coder, occupying that sort of market position, is seen to be technologically determined, and technologically finite.

jackyli02 · Answer

This is explicitly framing hand-written code as the wrong workflow. That's a significant shift from even six months ago. My sense is this will become more common at companies building on top of APIs and integrations (Zapier's core domain), where the code is more glue than architecture. Whether it scales to systems-level work is a different question. The failure modes of agent-written code are still poorly understood, and "built mitigations" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that job listing.

daringrain32781 · Answer

Seems to me like they&rsquo;ve decided (or want to believe) that if all code isn&rsquo;t output by an agent the company is losing out on potential work output.Agents are still far too unreliable and dumb for this model and need strict discipline by a developer who really understands fundamentals. And sometimes it&rsquo;s just faster to do the damn thing yourself instead of writing a whole paragraph to an agent that still might do it wrong.

soulchild37 · Answer

Prediction, the company posting this listing will go under in 2 years

codingdave · Answer

This may be a bit of a tangent, but I don't agree with being all-in on agentic coding.
Look at the bigger picture. In many other industries, LLM-based solutions are in place. They were embraced, implemented, people learned what works and does not, and the solutions were built a while ago. They are up and running and just day-to-day business at this point.
But with coding, we're still fighting to make it happen. We see job postings with all that detail because it does not "just work". We keep trying to find the best models, the best practices. People keep saying that "Real Soon Now", LLMs can do our jobs 100%. But at the end of the day, we're still writing the same apps we've been writing. Our output has not changed, except maybe a little more speed alongside a little more slop. People who do get it to work do so by throwing a lot of money at tokens. Is that all we are doing? Funding the AI platform vendors and stressing ourselves over... a minor speed improvement?
Am I the only one that thinks that the tech industry is actually failing at AI, and all the talk and effort about it just proves that point?