Competency

HUNTR/X is really good at a few things: singing, dancing, and slaying demons. If you’re a fan of competency and don’t know about KPop Demon Hunters, I highly recommend you check it out. 😉

OK, that was a joke. Everyone is a fan of competency, especially our own competency. Everyone wants to be good at something - cooking, driving, or writing hit K-pop songs.

For those programming computers the last twenty or thirty years, competency has been both highly regarded and highly paid. I won’t feign humility - I’ve felt like a wizard 🧙‍♂️ as I crank out C++ code, back and forth between writing tests and production code, defining the architecture, implementing it, making it fast, making it beautiful 🤩, with deep knowledge of the whole system, slaying demons bugs, all the while in a flow state. I vividly recall my joy when I first realized you could get paid to do this. What a rush!

Do Rumi, Mira, and Zoey have a similar experience when they are on stage, seeing gold streaks across the sky? I have to believe they do. The fact is, competency feels good, and that is a good thing! The ability to master a skill or task, to do something well, really well, is positive for you and others around you.

Three philosophies of life

I’ve seen at least three different reactions to coding with AI agents lately.

All agents all the time

This approach seems to come most prominently from those selling tokens, like Anthropic’s “we have so many PRs we need a new source control system” post. They are shipping lots of code, making lots of changes, and making products that I love to use every day. These folks focus on the input - number of PRs shipped, lines of code, tokens used. Do they have an interest in hyping more and more agent use? Absolutely. Is this a sustainable way to develop software? Maybe.

Build anything we want

If you want to get excited about what AI can do with software, follow DHH on X. Seriously, his greatest competency isn’t writing code or driving race cars (he’s good at those too) - no, it’s “transfer of enthusiasm.” I need to stay away from his feed to avoid buying a PC just to run Omarchy for fun. 💸 These folks focus on the outcome, and the pace is dizzying. The code is not important, since this is software engineering at a level of abstraction above the code.

No agents allowed in the code

Here GCC seems to be the most well-known example. Much of this is for respectable licensing reasons. But the policy explicitly calls out that “All contributions must be submitted by a human who understands the changes and is prepared to answer questions about them.” These folks focus on the importance of the code itself.

More than a feeling

I’ve had the privilege of working with a number of highly competent software engineers in my career. The team I support at Modular is among the best. But what competency means for software engineers is changing, and changing fast. Whether the key metric we will use to measure competency is input, outcomes, or code, I can’t tell (maybe we don’t have to choose just one).

But the feeling of competency in crafting code, the thing I’m good at, the thing I’ve built my career on, it will not be valued for long. This is scary.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to live in a time and place where I am paid well to sit all day in a comfortable chair wearing jeans and a hoodie, engaging my mind to solve challenging problems. But change is hard, especially when it changes how we see ourselves as competent, as valued.

I don’t know how this will turn out. Maybe software engineering jobs will grow! I do know that you - computer programmer, coder, software engineer - you are valued for much more than your competency at writing code. Beyond anything you build, or design, or write, you are valued for who you are. Now go slay your demons. ⚔️