The job description just changed in Silicon Valley. With AI coding agents now capable of handling most routine development tasks, tech companies are realizing the most valuable employees aren't the ones who can code fastest - they're the ones who know what to tell the machines to build. According to a new Wired analysis, the industry is coalescing around a new buzzword for this shift: 'agentic' individuals who excel at directing autonomous systems rather than doing the work themselves.
Silicon Valley just admitted something it's been dancing around for months: the actual work of coding is becoming less important than knowing what to build. AI agents that can write, test, and deploy code are maturing fast enough that companies are fundamentally rethinking what they value in employees.
The term making the rounds is 'agentic' - describing workers who treat AI coding assistants less like tools and more like junior developers to manage. It's a subtle but seismic shift in how tech work gets done. Instead of spending hours debugging or implementing features, engineers are expected to operate at a higher level of abstraction, defining problems and orchestrating AI systems to solve them.
This isn't just about GitHub Copilot or ChatGPT autocompleting your functions anymore. Modern AI coding agents from companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google can handle entire tickets - understanding requirements, writing code, running tests, and even deploying changes with minimal human oversight. The bottleneck is no longer how fast you can type or how many languages you know. It's whether you can effectively direct these systems toward valuable outcomes.
Tech leaders are noticing the pattern. The developers who thrive in this environment aren't necessarily the most technically skilled in traditional terms. They're the ones who can break down ambiguous business problems, communicate clearly with AI systems, and quality-check the output without getting lost in implementation details. According to industry observers cited by , companies are starting to screen for these delegation and orchestration skills during interviews.
