Last week I attended NDC Sydney, a large global tech conference aimed at software developers. The vibe at the conference was excitement and the AI talks were definitely front and centre. While there were the usual never ending debates around MCPs (MCPs are dead, MCPs are a must-have, MCPs are just a temporary tool until CLIs can catch up), what stuck with me was how few people were confidently using AI and agentic tools in their daily workflows. A number of the talks I attended during the two day conference were focused on building confidence with the tools and making sure that there was still a focus on learning and reading code, that we weren't loosing our ability to read and understand code because it's been passed off to an AI agent. I found these ideas of code literacy and competence really interesting. It occurred to me, listening to some of these speakers, that maybe my willingness to pick up these tools, comes from being a self-taught software engineer.…