The competitive advantage belongs to companies, not engineers. That's exactly the conflict. What you're predicting -- voluntary adoption due to advantages -- is precisely what is happening, but it's happening at the company level. It's why companies are mandating it and some engineers are resisting it. Just like in the riots I mentioned -- introduction of agricultural machinery was a unilateral decision made by landowners and tenant farmers, often directly against the wishes of the laborers.

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munk-a 3 hours ago | parent [-]

A well run company would provide an incentive to their employees for increasing their productivity. Why would employees enthusiastically respond to a mandate that will provide them with no benefit?

Companies are just groups of employees - and if the companies are failing to provide a clear rationale to increase productivity those companies will fail.

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nilkn 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm sorry to say this, but the company does not need employees to respond enthusiastically. They'll just replace the people who resist for too long. Employees who resist indefinitely have absolutely zero leverage unless they're working on a small subset of services or technologies where AI coding agents will never be useful (which rules out the vast majority of employed software developers).

	▲	munk-a 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Oh, they can certainly do that (in part evidenced by companies doing that). It's a large cost to the company, you'll get attrition and lose a lot of employee good-will, and it'll only pay off if you're right. Going with an optional system by making such tools available and incentivizing their use will dodge both of those issues and let you pivot if the technology isn't as beneficial as you thought.