From all the tech that we have, agents are really not that hard to learn on the job. They're also not a magical silver bullet.
I think upskilling is the right move in this environment and it is dead simple: Invest a couple of days to show initiative, learn agents yourself and be able to speak from true experience.
You’re more or less admitting that you’re playing trendy tech lottery. Which is fine, but maybe not generalizable to the whole industry.
I don't know about that, and I am 100% biased so take what I say with a grain of salt. My position is very much this: you may not trust coding agents to make code changes, but if you're not willing to treat them as a research aid or have them work for you, you're pretty much saying they can't help you work more efficiently.
I'm working on a Show HN post that includes:
https://github.com/gitsense/smart-ripgrep
It's a fork of BurntSushi/ripgrep. What I hope to show with it is that you don't have to use coding agents to code. They can be used to surface knowledge that's buried in documents, issue comments, PR discussions, and other places.
Believing coding agents are trendy would be like saying search was trendy in 1998. They're not going to change the world the way Anthropic wants us to believe, but they will shape how humans develop software. And I think for the better, since AI is capable of processing information at scale to help you move forward.
What you’re selecting for is enthusiasm, knowing the current shibboleths of the in-group, and possibly for who knows how to use them to make a good demo.
And, fair enough, if that's what you want. But it's not "proven experience" in my mind.