Rewriting Our Operating System
The main distinction between Agentic AI and traditional software is that Agents operate like a teammate, while software is a tool we introduce into our workflows. For those of us who have been in tech for over a decade, our experience inertia pushes us to manage AI as a tool, using the same playbooks we used for traditional software. We are trying to control a digital partner with management logic that fundamentally misclassifies its capability. This systematic failure is the biggest vulnerability mid-career tech leads face today.
Our career's hard-won "best practices" are not wisdom; they are legacy code carrying massive technical debt. That code delivered past success, but it is now the prime inhibitor of our future. If we are not aggressively deprecating those old methods and rewriting our own professional operating system, we are becoming fundamentally incompatible with a world built on Agentic capacity.
