Building agents is commoditizing: domain know-how and tooling are what matter now
dotey · x · 2026-10-23
dotey endorses a take from dongxinlp arguing that the ability to "build agents" has become cheap and formulaic — what matters more is building tools for agents, restructuring workflows around them, and deep familiarity with specific business domains.
dongxinlp says the "AI engineer" role now has little to do with AI itself, and advises young people in AI to move closer to the models: training, quantization, inference, or AI infrastructure. dotey draws an analogy to software development: writing code was never the valuable part — solving business problems with code is.
More from AGI Musings
- AI hiring cools: PhD with six top papers gets only 5-6 offers from 20+ firms — dotey · 2026-10-23
- Sentry's security lead challenges "php2shell worst day in cybersecurity" claims — joshua_saxe · 2026-10-23
- Cognitive diversity may be essential to aligning multi-agent AI swarms — repligate · 2026-10-23
- David Patterson: superintelligence benefits will be evenly distributed in market democracies — rand_longevity · 2026-10-23
- Refusing AI advice isn't thinking for yourself: an essay on the deference debate — chalmermagne · 2026-10-23
- If AI lets anyone build software, what's left for developers? Reddit debates the moat — InfluenceSilver3590 · 2026-10-23