It's not the same, and there is no going back. We moved another layer up in the abstraction stack, but this shift feels fundamentally different.

I wonder if the people who enjoy the purely agentic version would also enjoy management. Personally, I have said no to more money because I enjoy the ground level work. But that work is just not the same.

I don't think it's the same as management. As a manager, you're not responsible for the code your team creates. You're responsible for their output, but that's fundamentally different. I also think you're managing people's emotions, expectations, holding people accountable, etc. Maybe those who enjoy working with agents would actually rather be PMs?

I agree the shift feels different than e.g. going from jquery to react or something.