Article: In the Agent Era, Three Types of People Thrive

On October 30, 2026, Juejin published an essay titled “Three kinds of people who thrive in the Agent era,” asking where human value ends up once agents take over execution. The author's answer is three profiles: people with ideas who dislike hands-on work, people who habitually think on behalf of users and agents, and people with the judgment not to be led astray by AI. The first two traits were long treated as personal shortcomings, the piece notes; the third determines whether the other two point in the right direction.

To back this up, the essay gathers first-hand statements. Kent Beck said in 2023, and repeated in a 2025 interview, that “90% of my skills became worthless, and the value of the remaining 10% rose 1000x.” That surviving 10%, he clarified, is deciding what to build, setting milestones, and controlling design complexity. Boris Cherny, who leads Claude Code, said in January of this year that all of his own code has been written by Claude for more than two months — 22 PRs merged one day, 27 the day before. Going further back, Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, named laziness the first virtue of a programmer back in 1996, defining it as willing to invest upfront effort to lower total energy spent. The essay also cites an Anthropic post from July 2025 arguing that Claude Code means anyone who can describe a problem clearly can build the solution, and treats specifying problems precisely and supplying sufficient context as a reusable working method, drawing on material from Anthropic, Shopify, and METR. The piece remains a single-author opinion at this point, with no follow-up developments on record.