My two cents on this is: If you’re feeling left out and don’t know what direction to take: 1.You’re not alone. The majority of the noise is skewed toward engineers who either directly work on these agents or have an investment in them, so they can spend more of their time exploring them. 2.If you’re unsure where to start, my advice is to go back to the very foundations. Forget whatever you hear or see, ignore the noise, log off Twitter if you must. Go build something that exposes you to the fundamentals. Read, implement, fail, repeat. The foundations of software engineering have never been more important than they are now. That’s how you distinguish yourself. But Temi, I’d be left behind. No, not really. At least, I don’t think so. Here’s why: •We’re just getting started, and today’s “hot cake” will be replaced in 3–6 months. New ways of working with agents will emerge. This year alone we’ve had MCP, skills, A2A protocols, etc. It’s obvious the field is still shaping up, and nothing is quite concrete yet. •With solid foundations, you’d be better equipped to understand what is happening or what the agent is doing. You’d be in a better position to decide what requires you in the loop and what can be YOLO’d by the agent. You’d also be able to improve and grow at an accelerated rate. 3.Leverage the agent as your senior engineer while learning. That’s an unbiased engineer with billions of contexts on engineering. Ask it to review your work. Ask it to show you different approaches to doing things. 4.Most companies are still playing catch-up for good reasons. The tech isn’t there yet to fully give it autonomy. We’re still not close to self-evolving agents, and the justification of the cost vis-à-vis the results isn’t there yet. What does this mean? There’s still a place for engineers with strong fundamentals, and companies are still looking for them. People who can reason about systems, make trade-offs, debug when things inevitably break, and take ownership end-to-end. Agents can help you move faster, but they don’t replace judgment. Someone still needs to define the problem, put the right constraints in place, and be accountable for the outcome. Until the tech is good enough to reason about context, evolving requirements, and long-term system health on its own, there’s a real place for engineers who understand what they’re building and why. And honestly, that’s where the leverage is. So ignore the noise, build more, get your hands dirty.