Career advice in the agent era
Theo gives long-form career advice for devs entering the industry in the agent era. Headline: stop optimizing for being a faster typist, start optimizing for being the person who decides what to build and verifies it works.
Skills to invest in
- Reading code fast (review is the new hot-loop).
- System design and data modelling — agents still can't pick the right shape for you.
- Testing and observability — verifying agent output is the bottle- neck; learn to instrument and assert.
- Communication — picking up ambiguous product asks and turning them into specs the agent can execute.
Skills to deprioritize
- Memorizing framework APIs.
- Hand-writing CRUD scaffolds.
- "Whiteboard algorithm" prep beyond the basics.
Career framing
- Junior pipeline is the most disrupted segment; explicitly seek roles where you can ship to real users with senior review, not roles where you write tickets all day.
- Pick boring stacks for leverage; take risks on the problem domain instead.