>"Why are we paying you $150k/yr to middleman a chatbot?"
Because I don't get paid $150k/yr to write HTML and CSS. I get paid to provide technical solutions to business problems. And "chatbots" are a very useful new tool to aid in that.
> I get paid to provide technical solutions to business problems.
That's true of all SWEs who write HTML and CSS, and it's the reason I don't think there's much downside for devs to not proactively start using these agentic tools.
If it truly turns weeks of work into hours as you say, then my managers will start asking me to use them, and I will use them. I won't be at a disadvantage compared to people who started using them a bit earlier than me.
If I am looking for a new job and find an employer that wants people to use agentic tools, then I will tell the hiring manager that I will use those tools. Again, no disadvantage.
Being outdated as a tech employee puts you at a disadvantage to the extent that there is a difficult-to-cross gap. If you are working in COBOL and the market demands Rust engineers, then you need a significant amount of learning/experience to catch up.
But a major pitch of AI tools is that it is not difficult to cross the gap. You draw on your domain experience to describe what you want, and it gives it to you. When it makes a mistake, you draw on your domain experience to tweak or fix things as needed.
Maybe someday there will be a gap. Maybe people will develop years of experience and intuition using particular AI tools that makes them much more attractive than somebody without this experience. But the tools are churning so quickly (Claude Code and Cursor are brand new, tools from 18 months ago are obsolete, newer and better tools are surely coming soon) that this seems far off.
Because I don't get paid $150k/yr to write HTML and CSS. I get paid to provide technical solutions to business problems. And "chatbots" are a very useful new tool to aid in that.