Why are good developers so wary of agentic development?

Experienced developers are cautious about agentic AI development not primarily because they fear job loss, but because they worry these tools generate code that works in isolation but fails in production environments. Their hesitation stems from hard-won knowledge about the importance of testing, reliability, maintainability, and operational safety—principles that early coding agents often bypass, making it difficult to trust systems built entirely this new way without proven methodologies.