--- title: The Agent-Era Career | daily.dev description: Addy Osmani, former Google engineering lead, shares career advice for the agentic AI era. The core thesis: AI excels at anything with an answer key, so durable... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/the-agent-era-career-t1s74s761 twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: The Agent-Era Career | daily.dev og:description: Addy Osmani, former Google engineering lead, shares career advice for the agentic AI era. The core thesis: AI excels at anything with an answer key, so durable... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/the-agent-era-career-t1s74s761 og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/T1S74S761.png og:image:alt: The Agent-Era Career og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # The Agent-Era Career **[Addy Osmani](https://daily.dev/sources/addy)** · [@addyosmani](https://daily.dev/addyosmani) · 9 min read · 98 upvotes · 1 comments ## Summary Addy Osmani, former Google engineering lead, shares career advice for the agentic AI era. The core thesis: AI excels at anything with an answer key, so durable careers are built on judgment — choosing what to build and evaluating whether it's good. Key principles include optimizing for scarce resources (reputation over compensation), learning to find problems rather than just solve them, practicing deliberate skill-building without agents to avoid judgment atrophy, shifting from doing to directing agents with clear specs and verification, owning what you ship regardless of who wrote it, and always pushing past the median output agents produce. Public work, finishing strong, and staying near hard problems are the compounding advantages that matter most. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community discussion Top comments from developers on daily.dev. **@sunbornval** · 12 upvotes > Nice post. Reached similar conclusion from a research standpoint: [https://valentinguigon.substack.com/p/the-better-judgment-project-how-ai](https://valentinguigon.substack.com/p/the-better-judgment-project-how-ai) > > _If AI systems increasingly do the first-order work, valuable human contributions will come from interrogating the system’s assumptions, recognizing missing variables, and identifying when a confident forecast is miscalibrated or misinformed. [...] Additionally, detecting AI blind spots and determining what an event is actually worth to a given individual, given its probability,... ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Agentic Skill Decay](https://daily.dev/posts/agentic-skill-decay-nzqkcham8) · Addy Osmani · 88 upvotes · 13 comments - [How to use AI as a real career advantage](https://daily.dev/posts/how-to-use-ai-as-a-real-career-advantage-knjv0gto8) · All Things Open · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [How to Get Hired in the AI Era](https://daily.dev/posts/how-to-get-hired-in-the-ai-era-s6jyddas8) · Towards Data Science · 90 upvotes · 5 comments - [AI is rewriting the developer career ladder. Here’s how to stand out.](https://daily.dev/posts/ai-is-rewriting-the-developer-career-ladder-here-s-how-to-stand-out--1eooxmc2j) · GitHub Blog · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#career](https://daily.dev/tags/career), [#ai-agents](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-agents), [#productivity](https://daily.dev/tags/productivity), [#vibe-coding](https://daily.dev/tags/vibe-coding) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/the-agent-era-career-t1s74s761) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"The Agent-Era Career","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-agent-era-career-t1s74s761","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-agent-era-career-t1s74s761"},"datePublished":"2026-07-06T20:34:49.928Z","dateModified":"2026-09-13T20:00:17.037Z","description":"Addy Osmani, former Google engineering lead, shares career advice for the agentic AI era. 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Reached similar conclusion from a research standpoint: https://valentinguigon.substack.com/p/the-better-judgment-project-how-ai\nIf AI systems increasingly do the first-order work, valuable human contributions will come from interrogating the system’s assumptions, recognizing missing variables, and identifying when a confident forecast is miscalibrated or misinformed. […] Additionally, detecting AI blind spots and determining what an event is actually worth to a given individual, given its probability, should become essential new skills. This is its own form of tool-oriented metacognition: confidence about the adequacy of the system that is telling you about the world.\n[…]\nIn a world of abundant answers, machines will likely handle information retrieval, detection of falsehood, and calibration of confidence. With a sufficiently good database, you can link any fact to any other fact and ask any question you want. For that reason, choosing what to attend to, defining the right problem, and knowing which question to ask at time t for the problem at hand will become one of the most important skills. We will need to figure out what it is that we don’t know, and what is the proper way to understand the problem at hand.","datePublished":"2026-07-06T21:58:52.914Z","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/T1S74S761#c-GEtKBKnho","author":{"@type":"Person","name":"Vale","url":"https://daily.dev/sunbornval","image":"https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/92153034?v=4"},"interactionStatistic":{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":12}}]} ```