Whether agents feel like liberation or loss depends on which joy of engineering you lean on most: making, knowing, or mattering.

I've seen engineers say many conflicting things about agents: some are bubbling with excitement and for the first time ever, they feel like they're in an all-star lineup, while others mourn for the death of their craft, leaving them feeling hollow.

I'm someone who works with agents every day, so I understand these sentiments. Rather than take sides, my hope is that I help you understand this in a more nuanced way.

Too often we see two camps: people who love the joy of coding and people who love the joy of shipping. I think this is a gross oversimplification. Rather than asking you to pick a side, I want to ask you to reflect on the elements of your work that are the most nourishing to you.

I think most of us have three sources of joy in our work, which we interweave in multiple ways:

- The joy of making (or "flow"): the joy of molding things in our hand and feeling that sweet moment when it all clicks into place.

- The joy of knowing: the joy of having such a strong mental model of our systems that we sense where a bug will be just by glancing at files.

- The joy of mattering: the joy of knowing that you are the expert that it all relied on.

Agents affect each of these elements in subtly different ways, which is why this discussion can be so complicated (we're mourning for different losses, and we're arguing from different places).

The joy of making is easy to maintain. it just moves up a level. You're not shaping every line anymore. You're shaping the system or factory, in a loop fast enough that flow still happens. And when you miss the old flow, nothing stops you from writing the code yourself.

The joy of knowing is especially at risk of erosion, so it's important to pay attention to it. Sometimes you'll realize you're reaching for a design you should be able to conjure automatically, but your intuition comes up with nothing.

Picking an option from an agent's suggestions is a different skill than conjuring an idea in the first place. If you always pick and never conjure, the ability to conjure will erode. You can't direct something you don't even loosely understand. If you don't understand your own codebase, you're not directing an agent to do something, the agent is directing you.

You matter. Obsolescence does affect you, but, you, your judgment, and especially your need for judgment, has never been more important. You get to decide what problems to solve, and you get to bring your taste and judgment to the work you do. You get to take ownership of it, all of it, whatever ships.

That feeling of sadness isn't a sign of failure to adapt. Grief means that you're attached to something, and that it's natural to feel grief when you see your work changing in ways that feel unfamiliar.

Lean into the things that make your work yours, and work on them more.