Addy Osmani: Agents Erode Engineers' Joy of Knowing — If You Only Pick, Never Conjure
addyosmani · x · 2026-10-09
Addy Osmani's long essay unpacks engineers' conflicting feelings about agents: some feel like they joined an all-star lineup, others mourn the death of their craft. He argues the usual split between "joy of coding" and "joy of shipping" is too crude, and identifies three sources of joy: the joy of making (flow, molding things until they click), the joy of knowing (a mental model strong enough to sense where a bug lives by glancing at files), and the joy of mattering (being the expert everything relied on).
Agents hit each differently: making survives easily, just moving up a level — you shape the system or factory instead of every line, and flow still happens. Knowing is most at risk of erosion: picking from an agent's suggestions is a different skill than conjuring ideas, and if you only pick and never conjure, the conjuring erodes — "if you don't understand your own codebase, the agent is directing you." Judgment and taste have never mattered more; you still decide what problems to solve and own whatever ships. He closes: grief means you're attached to something — lean into the parts that make the work yours.
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