At the very least, I think there’s going to be a competitive advantage for new engineers that do learn to code by hand even if they never do it at their jobs. There is a cognitive ability and understanding that is developed when building code that becomes very useful when coding with agents.

So, I hope coding goes away, but it is changing form though.

I largely have the same feeling: I used to love it but today it's hard to justify coding by hand still. Even for my personal projects I no longer code by hand.

But it's not all bad because with an agent I'm able to achieve much more. I loved debugging an issue and diving deep but an agent with access to observability data and the code is so so much faster that it makes no sense to _not_ use one. I always wanted to have sophisticated debugging/introspection tooling at work but it nevers get prioritized; now it's doable by an agent almost autonomously. And the same goes for performance and profiling: point an agent at pprof for example and you can test all kinds of stuff without lifting a finger.

However I agree about "the zone", working with agents doesn't feel as good as working by hand.