How Coding Agents Are Reshaping Engineering, Product and Design

Kind of obvious, but with rising capabilities comes rising expectations:

If you are an engineer right now - you should either aim to get fantastic at system design and comfortable reviewing architectures and aim to be a reviewer… or try to grow your product/design skills and become a builder.

If you are in product or design - you either have to have a fantastic mental model for product/design and largely review, or jump into coding agents and improving your coding chops.

Sure, it’s trivial to say “you have to upskill either by becoming a good generalist builder or a specialist with deep expertise” - wasn’t it ever thus? But it’s worth explicitly stating if only to force oneself to ask: “which lane am I in?”

I’ve always been a bit of a jack-of-all-trades generalist, so the choice is fairly simple for me. I’ve been surprised, though, by the number of technical people I’ve spoken to who refuse to budge from their domain - “I’m not going to work on anything until a product owner hands the requirement to me in some state of completeness”. Fair enough, but unless you’re a truly elite contributor that position is rapidly becoming untenable.