I don't think it will go away, I think there will remain a niche for code where we care about precision. Maybe that niche will get smaller over time, but I think it will be a hold out for quite a while. A loose analogy I've found myself using of late is comparing it to bespoke vs off the shelf suits.

For instance, two things I'm currently working on: - A reasonably complicated indie game project I've been doing solo for four years. - A basic web API exposing data from a legacy database for work.

I can see how the API could be developed mostly by agents - it's a pretty cookie cutter affair and my main value in the equation is just my knowledge of the legacy database in question.

But for the game... man, there's a lot of stuff in there that's very particular when it comes to performance and the logic flow. An example: entities interacting with each other. You have to worry about stuff like the ordering of events within a frame, what assumptions each entity can make about the other's state, when and how they talk to each other given there's job based multi-threading, and a lot of performance constraints to boot (thousands of active entities at once). And that's just a small example from a much bigger iceberg.

I'm pretty confident that if I leaned into using agents on the game I'd spend more time re-explaining things to them than I do just writing the code myself.

I write systems rust on the cutting edge all day. My work is building instant MicroVM sandboxes.

I was shocked recently when it helped me diagnose a musl compile issue, fork a sys package, and rebuild large parts of it in 2 hours. Would've taken me atleast 2 weeks to do it without AI.

Don't want to reveal the specific task, but it was a far out of training data problem and it was able to help me take what would've normally taken 2 weeks down to 2 hours.

Since then I've been going pretty hard at maximizing my agent usage, and tend to have a few going at most times.