An anonymous backend engineer with ten years in payments has written one of the more clear-eyed accounts of what agentic coding feels like from inside a specialised career. The essay on the Human in the Loop blog traces three pillars eroding in order: domain knowledge first, then debugging, and finally code architecture, which he says the industry has shrunk to the word "taste".
The sharpest detail is about hiring, not tooling. His company, recruiting again after a layoff eight months ago, has stopped advertising roles as "Software Engineer - Area" and now lists plain "Software Engineer" positions, assigning teams only after the offer is accepted. Specialisation stopped being a differentiator before it stopped being useful. He also estimates 90% of his production bugs, including race conditions in distributed systems, are now one-shotted by coding CLIs wired to Sentry and Datadog through MCP.
His closing worry is economic rather than existential: if every specialist becomes a generalist steering agents, the price of a generalist falls unless demand rises to match. He sees no sign that it will.