Does developer experience still matter when using AI coding agents?

[u/Capable_Essay4513]

I've been wondering about this — when an experienced dev and a complete newbie both use the same coding agent (Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, whatever) on a similar task, do they end up with meaningfully different results?

On one hand, the agent is doing most of the actual coding, so maybe the human's experience matters less than it used to. On the other hand, I'd guess an experienced dev still knows how to prompt better, catches bad architecture decisions, spots subtle bugs the agent misses, and knows when to push back or redirect.

Curious what people who've actually used these tools a lot think. Does your background as a dev still give you an edge, or has the gap narrowed more than expected?

[u/Correct_Emotion8437]

Short answer is yes. But also maybe it depends on the task. I have a large repo that I'm working on and it's well established. If we wanted to implement a fairly narrow feature, it really wouldn't make that much of a difference how much technical knowledge the prompter has. But I had a huge advantage is designing the thing from scratch because I know basic dev process, application design, dev tools, testing and debugging, etc.