AI agents automate the grunt work engineers learn from — how to train the next generation?
bendee983 · x · 2026-11-12
bendee983 highlights one of the biggest software engineering challenges in the AI agent era: how to train the next generation of engineers.
- Engineers historically built fundamentals by being in the weeds — writing code, debugging, stress testing — tasks now being automated by agents
- He rejects the Assembly-to-C analogy: past transitions left friction that forced people to learn fundamentals; AI has effectively removed all of it
- Quoting @johncodes: hard skills are cratering — even the Google SRE book needed a full rewrite for the agent era; the real question is how to develop first-principles thinking without daily hands-on work
Core thesis: experienced engineers are needed to steer agents, but the path to acquiring that experience is being cut off.
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