It really is wild to have seen this happen over the last year. The days of traditional "design-to-code" FE work are completely over. I haven't written a line of HTML/CSS in months. If you are still doing this stuff by hand, you need to adapt fast. In conjunction with an agentic coding IDE and a few MCP tools, weeks worth of UI work are now done in hours to a higher level of quality and consistency with practically zero effort.
The only disadvantage to not using these tools would be that your current output is slower. As soon as your employer asks for more or you're looking for a new job, you can just turn on AI and be as fast as everyone who already uses it.
Because I don't get paid $150k/yr to write HTML and CSS. I get paid to provide technical solutions to business problems. And "chatbots" are a very useful new tool to aid in that.
That's true of all SWEs who write HTML and CSS, and it's the reason I don't think there's much downside for devs to not proactively start using these agentic tools.
If it truly turns weeks of work into hours as you say, then my managers will start asking me to use them, and I will use them. I won't be at a disadvantage compared to people who started using them a bit earlier than me.
If I am looking for a new job and find an employer that wants people to use agentic tools, then I will tell the hiring manager that I will use those tools. Again, no disadvantage.
Being outdated as a tech employee puts you at a disadvantage to the extent that there is a difficult-to-cross gap. If you are working in COBOL and the market demands Rust engineers, then you need a significant amount of learning/experience to catch up.
But a major pitch of AI tools is that it is not difficult to cross the gap. You draw on your domain experience to describe what you want, and it gives it to you. When it makes a mistake, you draw on your domain experience to tweak or fix things as needed.
Maybe someday there will be a gap. Maybe people will develop years of experience and intuition using particular AI tools that makes them much more attractive than somebody without this experience. But the tools are churning so quickly (Claude Code and Cursor are brand new, tools from 18 months ago are obsolete, newer and better tools are surely coming soon) that this seems far off.