High Agency is Becoming More Valuable Than Coding
If you ask me what tech companies and startups value most today, I don’t think the answer is "coding" anymore.
For the last decade, knowing how to code was the ultimate cheat code for your career. If you knew React, Python, or Go, you were safe. But today, the mechanical act of coding is becoming dramatically easier. With AI assistants, we can generate boilerplate, write tests, explain complex frameworks, and spin up databases in seconds. The barrier to entry for simply writing syntax is dropping to zero.
But as the value of writing code goes down, the value of something else is skyrocketing. That thing is high agency.
The Scarcity of Initiative
High agency is a term that gets thrown around a lot in Silicon Valley, but its definition is surprisingly empirical: it is the ability to operate in a high-entropy environment, figure things out, and create momentum without waiting for a structured prompt.1
An engineer with low agency gets a Jira ticket, writes the exact code requested, and stops. If they hit a bug, they wait for the senior dev to help them. If the requirements are vague, they wait for the product manager to clarify them.
An engineer with high agency notices a problem before the Jira ticket even exists. They investigate the root cause, dig through the documentation, and formulate a solution. They don’t wait for perfect instructions; they collapse the ambiguity themselves.2
Why AI Can’t Replace Agency
Large Language Models are incredible pieces of technology, but they have one fundamental limitation: they are entirely reactive.3
An AI will not wake up on a Tuesday, notice that your app's onboarding flow is causing a 15% drop-off in user retention, and decide to redesign the database schema to fix it. An AI sits perfectly idle until a human being gives it a prompt. It has zero intrinsic motivation.
This means that in the AI era, the most valuable people are the ones providing the prompts, not just literally typing them into Cursor, but conceptually identifying what needs to be built in the first place. Anyone can implement tasks now. Very few people can consistently identify the right problems to solve.
How to Build Your Agency Muscle
If you want to survive the next decade of technology, you need to stop living inside step-by-step tutorials.
Tutorials are comforting because they remove ambiguity. But ambiguity is exactly where your value lies. To build high agency, you have to put yourself in situations where nobody knows the answer. Build side projects that are slightly too hard for you. Contribute to an open-source library where the codebase is a mess. Join a chaotic early-stage startup.
AI has increased the value of human initiative, not reduced it. The future doesn't belong to the fastest typist; it belongs to the person who knows what to build next.