The idea behind the cartoon
The job titles are moving faster than anyone can update their LinkedIn headline. Two years ago, “prompt engineer” sounded like a career. Then it became a phase. Then a punchline.
Collins Dictionary named “vibe coding” its 2025 Word of the Year, which tells you how fast the vocabulary is turning over. AI-assisted coding by natural-language prompt went from niche jargon to dictionary entry in under twelve months. By the time a title is official, the frontier has already moved to the next one: agentic engineering, where the job is not writing prompts anymore but directing a small team of AI agents that write, test and ship on their own.
I drew this because I have lived every panel of it, not as a joke about someone else’s job but about my own. Each title felt like the permanent one when I had it. None of them were.
The last panel is the real question behind the cartoon. Once the agents are good enough to coordinate each other, what is left for the human who used to coordinate them? My honest answer sits somewhere between “nothing” and “the same job with a new title,” and most of the current discourse has not caught up to that yet.
