Feb 26, 2026 2:00 PM

Are You ‘Agentic’ Enough for the AI Era?

Silicon Valley built AI coding agents that can handle most of the grunt work. Now, the most valuable skill in tech is deciding what they should do.

Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images

Silicon Valley has always prized “high-agency” individuals—people who impress their ideas upon the world by thinking for themselves and taking action without being told what to do. But as the performance of AI coding tools has surged, so has the industry’s emphasis on humans being "agentic" themselves.

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Maxwell Zeff is a senior writer at WIRED covering the business of artificial intelligence. He was previously a senior reporter with TechCrunch, where he broke news on startups and leaders driving the AI boom. Before that, Zeff covered AI policy and content moderation for Gizmodo, and wrote some of Bloomberg’s ... Read More

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TopicsModel Behavior artificial intelligence Startups Silicon Valley future of work agentic AI

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