The Risk of Agency: How AI Forces Us to Take It, and Why Germany Will Suffer More Than the US or China
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The Risk of Agency: How AI Forces Us to Take It, and Why Germany Will Suffer More Than the US or China<br>In Germany, we have a fetish for hierarchy, and yes, it has its merits. Or better to say had, because it is heavily under attack, and with it, both engineers and managers who hide behind it.
Julian Habekost<br>Jul 08, 2026
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As If Superintelligent Aliens Landed on Earth and Willfully Enslaved Themselves to Us
It is really, really hard to communicate to outsiders what kind of revolution just happened in the world of software engineering. Sure, people make hyper-personalized birthday greeting cards with AI, they let the AI word their emails, their letters, and let AI help them navigate bureaucracy. But nothing comes close to typing in a four-sentence instruction and then watching the AI agent for ten minutes reading the source code, searching the web, arguing with itself about the code, starting to change the code, programming tests to hunt down bugs, finding the bugs, correcting itself, and lastly documenting everything in a manner that I really should have done, but in reality, none of us ever did. What the AI did there in ten minutes would have been a day’s work a few months ago. And that concerns technical and coding domains that I am an expert in. It feels as if superintelligent and super-knowledgeable aliens landed on Earth and have willfully enslaved themselves to us. But without all the ethical implications.<br>Please Don’t Ask Me to Review Your AI’s Code
As a senior engineer, it is part of my job description to review the code of juniors. But with AI, I am increasingly reluctant to do that, because their code is now also, just like mine, written by AI. I already review my AI’s code; if I also review your AI’s code, what is actually your job then? The relationship between an engineer and an AI coding agent is very much like the relationship between a senior and a junior (albeit the best junior that ever existed). There is no point anymore in tying up junior-sized packages of well-specified tasks to give to juniors so they can feed them to an AI, when instead I can simply do it myself with less communication overhead.<br>No wonder the job market for junior software engineers has been crushed recently. If everyone has access to AI juniors now, every one of us human engineers has to become a senior. We can discuss the technical direction, but I am not taking responsibility for your AI’s code; you have to do that yourself, or you’re obsolete. If your AI’s code breaks something, I’m going to shame you (appropriately for a work relationship) in the next meeting for it.<br>To be fair, I work in corporate research and in experimental innovation projects with a lot of prototypical, alternative variants; we move fast and break things a lot anyway. If it happens, it usually means one to three engineers have one to three bad days at work. It’s a risk we can afford to let everyone on the team take.<br>This makes us one of the biggest beneficiaries of agentic AI engineering, because we can afford to go full YOLO, as the kids would say these days. Instead of exploring two different variants with two seniors and five juniors, we can explore up to seven variants now at the same time. I am expecting direction and ideas from everyone, and this is exactly what it means to act out agency.<br>The Crisis of the Junior is Not About Skills, It is About Denied Grassroots Agency
The closer you get to production code, to established businesses and proven software that needs incremental updates rolled out to users frequently, the less reasonable it becomes to develop seven different alternatives. Even there, there is an opportunity now to try to redevelop modules and parts of the software with much lower costs, but that again would just be innovation that is not rolled out immediately. For maintaining production code, someone has to make the final calls, and this someone will be the same person as before; but now that person also has AI juniors at their disposal. There is hardly any use for actual human juniors acting like seniors in production environments, hence almost no use for human juniors at all anymore in software maintenance.<br>A lot of people think this is a skill progression issue; they think that it is impossible to become a senior without having been a junior first. But firstly, I am not talking about skill; I am talking about roles and the agency they are granted. And secondly, I also disagree.<br>AI agents actually reduce the learning curve of coding and technology drastically because you can literally ask them to explain code or technology. We had people join our project who had no Deep Learning experience that went on to contribute an actual competitive neural network from scratch and also were able to defend its design decisions in a theoretical discussion—because they had done...