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Comment by cebert | Hacker News Reader

We won’t hire anybody moving forward who doesn’t have hands-on agentic programming experience. We’re in the traditionally slower moving GovTech space. I have to imagine this is now a common expectation in many sectors.

Teams where I work can use Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and Copilot CLI. Internally, it seems like Claude Code and Codex are the more popular tools being used by most software teams.

If you’re new to these tools, I highly recommend trying to build something with them during your free time. This space has evolved rapidly the past few months. Anthropic is offering a special spring break promotion where you can double the limits on weeknights and weekends for any of its subscription plans until the end of March.

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> We won’t hire anybody moving forward who doesn’t have hands-on agentic programming experience.

This doesn't make a lot of sense to me even as someone who uses agentic programming.

I would understand not hiring people who are against the idea of agentic programming, but I'd take a skilled programmer (especially one who is good at code review and debugging) who never touched agentic/LLM programming (but knows they will be expected to use it) over someone with less overall programming experience (but some agentic programming experience) every single time.

I think people vastly oversell using agents as some sort of skill in its own right when the reality is that a skilled developer can pick up how to use the flows and tools on the timescale of hours/days.

I suspect it’s not about agentic coding being a special skill, and more about why a competent programmer wouldn’t have tried it by this point, and whether that is a sign of ideological objections that could cause friction with the team. Not saying I agree with that thinking, but I definitely see why a hiring manager could think that way.

I can't get into that hiring manager's head. It shouldn't matter, if the candidate can deliver business value. That's what you are hiring them for. You're not hiring them to burn LLM tokens, you're hiring them to create business value. Why would you care if he does it by hand-coding, using an LLM, or chanting magic spells at the computer?

I was only granted permission to use it a few weeks ago and haven’t had time to set it up yet

> why a competent programmer wouldn’t have tried it by this point

What does one have to do with the other? Since when is following every fad a prerequisite for competence?

Don't shoot the messenger, I'm just telling you how some hiring managers might think, not endorsing the opinion and it's definitely not something I consider in my hiring.

I will say it's a little weird to frame it as "every fad" though. Do you really not see any net new or lasting utility for software engineering in AI tools? If not then more power to you, but software engineering being a fast-moving field where there are (fair or unfair) expectations to keep up is nothing new.

I certainly keep an eye on these developments, but I think the jury is still out on how useful/beneficial they actually are in practice. Generating more code in less time is not a useful measure of productivity for me.

Agree the jury is still out, but "More code in less time" is a shallow strawman. The better question is what is it good at and what is it not good at, and what are the ways to best leverage those capabilities. I've seen enough use cases from enough engineers now that I firmly believe anyone saying "nope never useful" is sticking their head in the sand.

If you aren't taking advantage of it, you are not a competent software engineer in 2026.

On the contrary. That's the only kind of competent software engineer in 2026. Competent engineers don't hand things off to the tool that generates terrible code really quickly.

Many companies cannot take advantage of it. Not everyone is making toy CRUD web applications to help consumers purchase things they don't want. Some people are making safety critical applications, and many more are making highly sensitive applications.

At my job, we just got agents. Because we had to self-host them in our new data center. Our product isn't the kind that can be used with Claude or Gemini, like, legally.

So you just said that you couldn’t use coding agents because you are doing “very important things”, while you clutch your pearls about what other people are doing but your company is in fact using coding agents…

I'm not clutching my pearls over anything, and our applications aren't important. They're mostly stupid and bad, but because of laws we can't just hand out that data to anybody with a pulse.

I think using agents is great. I'm just saying that lots of people haven't been using them not because they're dumb or a (sigh) luddite or whatever, but because they can't.

The economy is really big, and while most companies play fast and loose with data, many don't. Of the ones that do, most of them probably should not, but because it's not technically illegal, of course they do. That principle is a big part of the reason why the US sucks.

For us though, it is actually illegal, so we don't. And we're not the fucking CIA or something, again, we make bad stupid products. So, if that's the case for us, that's the case for a lot of companies.

We legitimately had to buy a new datacenter for this shit.

Claude has been a big boost to my sense of competency. I get to point out so many poor solutions in slop PRs now

Right. Using Claude Code & friends is not some esoteric skill that needs years in the trenches to learn which magical incantations to utter.

You prompt it. That's it. Yes, there are better and worse ways of prompting; yes, there are techniques and SKILLs and MCP servers for maximizing usability, and yes, there are right ways to vibe code and wrong ways to vibe code. But it's not hard. At all.

And the last person I want to work with is the expert vibe coder who doesn't know the fundamentals well enough to have coded the same thing by hand.

Yeah, will they take someone who has two months of hands-on with Claude Code, just not someone with zero? Come on, I'll take a great programmer with zero who knows they need to use it over a mediocre programmer who's been doing it since Claude Code released and I expect to be better off for doing so within 2 weeks.

Random question but what are some issues your facing with these ? I am just curious because everyone in my org uses them but act like it doesn't bring them any productivity gains probably they are scared to admit that it's actually been super helpful otherwise they are out of a job.

> Random question but what are some issues your facing with these ?

I’ve seen some folks who are quite productive with these tools, but there is a lot more slop too. On my team on same the code base you see two different team members producing vastly different results.

> On my team on same the code base you see two different team members producing vastly different results.

And if they use LLMs to assist, does the same thing happen?

If you're technically competent, as in you can program pretty well, you can pick up agentic programming fast. Like, in a week, max. And I don't mean be okay-enough. I mean be just as good as people who have been agentic coding this whole time.

And, at the end of the day, a person who can program will be better at agentic coding after a couple days than someone who cannot program who has been agentic coding for a year.

Agentic coding is just not all that complicated. It's a deep rabbit hole, sure, but figuring out how to prompt an AI is not that complicated. The harness can be, the skills might be, the subagent architecture maybe. But your organization should be standardizing that stuff. I would hope to God. Catching someone up to speed is very quick.

But, if you hire good engineers, you will be have a competently engineered product. That has always been the case and will continue to be the case. If you hire sales people and product managers, it will not. Again, that's always been the case.

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