When coding agents compress implementation from weeks to hours, the scarce skill is knowing what is worth building. What Atlassian means by a product engineer, and a practical routine for becoming one.
Agents can scale almost without limit; human attention cannot. Addy Osmani on where judgment should sit in a software factory, what a 2026 field experiment says about expertise, and how to keep your own judgment sharp.
A short, honest timeline: university and self-taught web in 2022–2023, agents and automation in 2024–2025, products with small teams, then cloud and speech AI in 2026, plus what I would pass on.
