Ask HN: Should Engineers Offload Coding to AI or Keep Their Skills Sharp?

Summary

A former software engineer says his role has shifted toward managing three or four coding agents at once, checking their work, fixing bugs, and ensuring features ship with clean, correct code. He believes this lets him create more value for his company, but questions whether it serves his own long-term relevance. He sometimes debugs errors or implements features manually to keep his critical-thinking and coding skills sharp, yet finds that an agent can finish the same work much faster. The discussion asks what employers will value more in the coming years: engineers who retain strong manual coding and debugging abilities, or engineers who can effectively orchestrate many agents despite relying less on those skills. The author invites other software engineers to describe how they balance productivity with maintaining technical capability.