I am trying to stay on the cutting edge, but I feel like this statement is untrue. I think we’re still in the sort of assembler/hacker/nerd era of AI coding. DevEx is going to change rapidly over the next few years. I’m hoping that we’ll get tools / languages / frameworks that essentially abstract the entire concept of a multi-agentic workflow away from you.
It’s like saying if you don’t learn CGI scripts in C you’ll be too far behind. Plenty of people started web development with Ruby on Rails.
And in fact I’d argue there’s lots of folks - sysadmins, low level developers that didn’t adapt well to change, the best strategy is probably get started but stay flexible, try to ride the wave but don’t overdo your investment into this generation of tools.
I also fully agree with "don’t overdo your investment into this generation of tools". IMO there are too many "cutting edge" tools trying to do all of this sexy stuff that'll be irrelevant in the next few months.
It's best to keep things simple with tooling. I push the edge on my general approach (99% of everything is AI coded) but conservative with my tools (pretty much only using Cursor now) to have at least some layer of stability. Otherwise stacking too many cutting edge things just feels too fragile, and will decay as AI improves, causing other issues. And this stuff is moving so fast and these companies are sufficiently motivated that the best things will make it into the tools, like plan/debug modes in Cursor.
I also feel that agentic coding is fast enough for now, so I don't even bother with multi-agent workflows. I still get a ton done and it's already at the edge of my ability to design coherently. Sure I could get 10X more code written in parallel with 10X more agents, but I can't design that fast, so it's just hurry up and wait with worse quality. And if that much code is needed I'm probably doing something wrong anyway.
ironbound•3w ago
Fixed your article matey