One of the interesting things about agentic coding is that it changes where the effort of programming goes.
A lot of traditional programming is occupied by fairly mechanical work: remembering APIs, writing glue code, satisfying the type checker, moving values between representations, fixing mundane bugs, etc.
This work isn't necessarily where the difficult reasoning happens, but it consumes attention anyway.
If agents take care of more of it, there is potentially more room to think about things like modeling the problem, choosing abstractions, defining invariants, exploring alternative designs or reasoning about failure modes.
In that sense I don't think agentic coding necessarily makes programming less intellectually demanding. It may actually do the opposite.
