HACKER Q&A
📣 ronbenton

Are we going to see more job postings asking for only agentic coding?


Was perusing job postings today and saw this on a Zapier listing:

"You work through AI agents, not alongside them. Your daily development workflow is built around directing and reviewing agent-written code, not writing it by hand. You have opinions about which models to use for which tasks, you've hit real failure modes and built mitigations, and your workflow is actively evolving. Bonus: you use multi-agent patterns, enable others on your team to build faster with AI, or have scaled AI impact beyond yourself."

This took me aback a little as I don't think yet I have seen companies talking about hand-writing code being bad.

Is this happening more often?

  👤 bediger4000 Accepted Answer ✓
I don't think we'll see much of this.

For the time being, agentic coding makes 10x supermen out of existing medium and long-time coders. How much more code do we need, after all?

Second, look at the rate of "AI" improvement. Agents will start writing themselves in a few weeks or months, then all the agent wranglers and LLM jockeys will become 100x supermen. Soon, humans won't be in the loop at all.

The window in which one could become an agentic-only-coder, occupying that sort of market position, is seen to be technologically determined, and technologically finite.

👤 jackyli02
This is explicitly framing hand-written code as the wrong workflow. That's a significant shift from even six months ago. My sense is this will become more common at companies building on top of APIs and integrations (Zapier's core domain), where the code is more glue than architecture. Whether it scales to systems-level work is a different question. The failure modes of agent-written code are still poorly understood, and "built mitigations" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that job listing.
👤 daringrain32781
Seems to me like they’ve decided (or want to believe) that if all code isn’t output by an agent the company is losing out on potential work output.

Agents are still far too unreliable and dumb for this model and need strict discipline by a developer who really understands fundamentals. And sometimes it’s just faster to do the damn thing yourself instead of writing a whole paragraph to an agent that still might do it wrong.

👤 soulchild37
Prediction, the company posting this listing will go under in 2 years