Unlike people who take the extreme position that vibe coders are useless, I do think LLMs often write individual functions or methods better than I do. But in a way, that does not fundamentally change the nature of the work. Even before LLMs, many functions and methods were effectively assembled from libraries, Stack Overflow snippets, documentation examples, and copied patterns.

The real limitation comes from the nature of transformer-based LLMs and their context windows. Agentic coding has a ceiling. Once the codebase reaches a scale where the agent can no longer hold the relevant structure in context, you need a programmer again.

At that point, software engineering becomes necessary: knowing how to split things according to cohesion and coupling, using patterns to constrain degrees of freedom, and designing boundaries that keep the system understandable.

In my experience, agentic coding is useful for building skeletons. But if you let the agent write everything by itself, the codebase tends to degrade. The human role is to divide the work into task units that the agent can handle well.

Eventually, a person is still needed.

If you make an agent do everything, it tends to create god objects, or it strangely glues things together even when the structure could have been separated with a simpler pattern. Thinking about it now, this may be exactly why I was drawn to books like EIB: they teach how to constrain freedom in software design so the system does not collapse under its own flexibility.

Both types expect you to spend as many tokens as possible so that the AI bubble doesn't burst (presumably because leadership has a financial interest in this).

Your actual productivity isn't important. If you point out that you're much faster writing code on your own in 90% of cases, you will be told you're not good at AI, you're not prompting it correctly and that generally you're not AI-native and that you'll be left behind. To be precise, token usage is a performance metric, so you'll be let go if Claude is not running continuously 8 hours a day.

I'd like to know how many places have mandates to write 100% of your code using AI, as well as to max out your AI agent's plan. For some reason nobody talks about it even though I know several companies around the world that are forcing this on their employees.

If you're looking for a job then you don't have a choice, it's better to have an income. But if you're looking to change jobs to get away from AI to actually be productive and gain experience then it's a very bad job market.