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I'm acutely aware that even 6-12 months off the keyboard is brutal to come back from, it's a real issue now because there are pockets of work where the agents can drive the whole thing. If you just autopilot there? The comprehension and skill debt becomes really hard to pay down in as little as a week or two for the really high complexity stuff.

I try hard to keep a serious feature branch going on every project where I'm driving it in emacs or vscode or whatever. `gptel` is great for this because it can tool call for the docs, be a super search engine like Google used to be but you're keeping your reflexes up, keeping the comprehension debt under control.

For me this is almost exactly like being in an EM role: it's so easy to lose track of the details, you have all these other demands on your time, there's pressure to grow headcount, and the costs of letting the skills slip is all but invisible for a while. But before you know it you're rubber stamping stuff you don't really grasp, you're not able to help people who are having trouble in the codebase, it's all bad. And depending on why you got into this business, it can become pretty joyless to be totally out of the loop.

Now every engineer has to navigate this. It's going to be interesting.