Last year I shipped an entire ERP as a single engineer working with a team of AI agents. I watched three agents investigate the same production incident and confidently disagree about the root cause. I interviewed ten practitioners about agentic adoption for a peer-reviewed study. So when someone asks me whether starting a software career today is a mistake, I have material instead of opinions.

This is a career talk grounded in that material. What actually changed: the unit of work one person can own. What did not: someone still has to answer for what ships, and the machine cannot. We look at what junior and senior roles become when writing code is cheap, which skills compounded in value (reading code you did not write, architecture, evaluation, saying no), which quietly stopped mattering, and what I would honestly do differently if I started today.

No doom, no hype, no LinkedIn inspiration. Real stories from real projects, including the ones where the agents made everything worse. For developers and architects at any career stage wondering where they fit in the agentic shift, and for the people who mentor them.

I shipped an ERP alone with a team of AI agents, then watched agents confidently disagree about a production incident. A career talk from that material: what the agentic shift really changes for developers and architects, and what I would do if I started today. No doom, no hype.