An AI agent can produce a working feature in minutes. Anyone who has watched it happen knows how impressive that is, and anyone who masters software development knows that “working fast” and “robust” are different things.
AI Agents perform well at speeding up workflowns and removing a lot of manual effort.
In a recent piece in Communications of the ACM, Mark Russinovich and Scott Hanselman describe an experience many IT consultants will recognize. Frontier coding agents show intern-like behaviors, and less experienced developers can struggle to spot when an agent is steering toward a suboptimal design or an erroneous conclusion. The authors put the underlying point simply: programming is not software engineering.
That distinction is where robustness lives. An AI agent can generate code that satisfies the request in front of it. Anticipating what will go wrong in production is something else: the malformed input, the partial failure, the case nobody wrote down. That judgement still comes from people who have seen systems fail.
Over-relying on AI risks missing subtle bugs, architectural flaws and vulnerabilities that only skilled IT consultants can catch.. Experienced IT consultants have the judgment to direct and evaluate AI output, which multiplies their productivity, while early-career IT consultants lack the experience to steer, verify and integrate it.
As argued in the article, organizations have traditionally relied on early-career IT consultants for simple bug fixes and coding tasks, tasks that are now done by AI Agents. If they are cut out, the pipeline that produces tomorrow’s senior IT consultants disappears.
So, when writing code becomes the easy part, the valuable work moves to specifying, reviewing and deciding. AI agents can take over tasks. They can not take over the time it takes to learn which tasks matter.
The answer has less to do with tools and more with how a firm treats its people.
At SYVANTECH, IT consultants who join us are not here to fill a role but to build a career, with direction, alignment and continuous support designed for long-term growth.
