Comment by sothatsit

A lot of the changes to get agents to work well is just good practice anyway. That's what is nice about getting these agents to work well - often, it just involves improving your dev tooling and documentation, which can help real human developers as well. I don't think this is going to become irrelevant any time soon.

The things that will change may be prompts or MCP setups or more specific optimisations like subagents. Those may require more consideration of how much you want to invest in setting them up. But the majority of setup you do for Claude Code is not only useful to Claude Code. It is useful to human developers and other agent systems as well.

> There was a lot of talk about prompting techniques ("prompt engineering") last year and now most of these are redundant.

Not true, prompting techniques still matter a lot to a lot of applications. It's just less flashy now. In fact, prompting techniques matter a ton for optimising Claude Code and creating commands like the planning prompt I created. It matters a lot when you are trying to optimise for costs and use cheaper models.

> I think these skills are just like learning how to use some tools in an ide. > if you have to switch ide they may not actually help you

A lot of the skills you learn in one IDE do transfer to new IDEs. I started using Eclipse and that was a steep learning curve. But later I switched to IntelliJ IDEA and all I had to re-learn were key-bindings and some other minor differences. The core functionality is the same.

Similarly, a lot of these "agent frameworks" like Claude Code are very similar in functionality, and switching between them as the landscape shifts is probably not as large of a cost as you think it is. Often it is just a matter of changing a model parameter or changing the command that you pass your prompt to.

Of course it is a tradeoff, and that tradeoff probably changes a lot depending upon what type of work you do, your level of experience, how old your codebases are, how big your codebases are, the size of your team, etc... it's not a slam dunk that it is definitely worthwhile, but it is at least interesting.