In this post from October 9, 2026, Addy Osmani, who works daily with agents, observes opposite reactions among engineers: some finally feel part of an all-star team, others mourn the death of their profession and feel empty. Rather than choosing a side, he rejects the usual division between those who love coding and those who love shipping, which he considers too simplistic, and invites everyone to identify what, in their work, nourishes them the most.
He distinguishes three sources of joy, intertwined in varying ways. The first is the joy of making, or flow: shaping things with one's own hands and feeling the moment everything clicks into place. The second is the joy of knowing: possessing a mental model of the system solid enough to guess where a bug lies by scanning through files. The third is the joy of mattering: knowing that one is the expert everything depended on. Agents affect each one differently, which explains why the debate is confused: people mourn different losses and argue from different places.
The joy of making is the easiest to preserve: it moves up a level. One no longer shapes each line but the system, or the factory, within a loop fast enough for flow to remain possible, and nothing prevents writing the code oneself when the old flow is missing. The joy of knowing is the most threatened. It happens that one looks for a design one should be able to produce outright and finds nothing. Choosing among an agent's proposals is a different skill from designing an idea: if one always chooses without ever designing, the capacity to design erodes. One cannot direct what one does not understand, even vaguely; without understanding of one's codebase, it is not the engineer who directs the agent but the reverse.
What remains is the joy of mattering. Obsolescence concerns the engineer, but their judgment, and the need for judgment, have never mattered more: they decide which problems to solve, bring their taste, and take ownership of everything that ships. Osmani adds that sadness is not a failure to adapt: grief reflects an attachment, and it is natural when work changes shape. He concludes by inviting readers to lean on what makes the work personally theirs.
The diagram accompanying the text is a three-circle Venn diagram, in which the knowing circle is dotted. It links each joy to an effect of agents (to preserve, most at risk, shifted toward judgment), places "you" at the center as a blend of the three, and adds two notes: choosing is not designing, and who's directing. Its caption says that grief is how one feels about what one cares about, and that one must then find what is specifically one's own and reinforce it.