After more than 25 years in technology, I’ve come to value the judgment people develop through experience. I regularly put similar questions to models and to senior technologists at Thoughtworks. For the difficult questions, I still get more useful answers from the humans or maybe more insightful with very specific experience that helps me better understand the point. They challenge the premise, recognise a pattern from something that went wrong ten years ago, or spot the organisational problem hiding inside the technical one. I can now access an extraordinary amount of information. I still need people who can help me think through what matters, I still need wisdom and insight. That type judgment is exactly what hesitant experienced developers are trying to protect.

And I want to be clear: they are not hesitant to use a coding assistant, they are hesitant to go all in and let the agents do all the execution. They are hesitant to take their hand off the wheel because they don’t have full confidence the agents have the right guardrails in place to run off on their own.