Route A is what concretely what is behind those "a select few are seeing 100x productivity increases" posts. agents bring enterprise-level engineering to the IC. your average enterprise PM has no idea how the code works either but knows who to call when it breaks or needs a new feature added. the industry split on agentic use lies in how much and to what degree you believe "but AI is different!" in this analogy
being good at "agentic engineering" is directly correlated with being a good eng manager. when you can treat code like cattle that builds features and passes test and not care about the lines. but what's lost is the knowing that someone knows the lines.
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