Why are good developers so wary of agentic development?

TL;DR
Good developers’ caution about agentic development comes from knowing that built isn’t the same as working in production.

I’ve been surprised by how many excellent developers have been hesitant to go all in on coding agents. These are people who usually try new ways of working before anyone else and in many cases invent new tools and practices that support building the application well. So why have we had so much reluctance?

The easy (lazy?) answer is that they love writing code, or they’re worried about their jobs. I’m sure that’s true for some people, some of the time. And I know it is true for some of the developers I talk to but I always felt there was something else, another fear hiding behind those obvious ones. When we put together the Technology Radar every six months I try to block out a chunk of time for us to do an open space. In September, a discussion we had on agentic development, which pushed it to its limits, finally helped me see clearly what that fear is.