An agent can tell you it's correct, not that it's good. @addyosmani, author & director of engineering, on finding your edge over AI coding agents: “I always go back to: what is alpha? My definition of alpha is advantage. What is the current thing that models are not very good at doing? For software engineers, we often say that your alpha is in taste. Are we building the right thing? Is the thing that we are building actually good? Sometimes people will say an agent can tell you if it's good. I push back on that. An agent can tell you if a thing looks correct, if it's matching a spec. It doesn't mean it can tell you what's good. Good can mean good from a user experience perspective, could be delightful, could be something that a person will actually want to come back to. And it is still sufficiently nuanced that it's going to take time for models to catch up to a point where they can replace that fully. We tell people that judgment, verification, all of these other aspects continue to be important. But even if you say, maybe a year or two from now, models will catch up. We still need engineers to be answerable for these systems. That doesn't happen overnight. That happens when you understand a system, people trust you and you have that expertise.”