Curiosity is now (and honestly, probably always was) the most valuable trait for a software engineer’s career. If you’re a software engineer that’s not wildly curious about agentic engineering in 2026, you’re probably NGMI in tech for much longer.
A CTO I coach asked me earlier this week what’s changed about how I now interview software engineers. My short answer: We now have to hire for Curiosity.
Last year I still used to spend some interview time on stack fit (you know the type: 3+ years of demonstrated commercial experience in our language, our cloud provider, our frameworks etc).
I don’t check any of that now. Instead, that time now goes to finding out how far a candidate’s own curiosity has taken them into agentic engineering.
I have a dozen or so markers I’m looking for, spread across the four rough levels of agentic engineering maturity. A few examples:
- They’ve worked out they need a context layer, and they have agents maintaining it for them
- They’ve written skills into their SDLC that consume that context, and skills that identify examples of agent steering and human judgement, then feed that back into their context layer
- They’ve at least tried a basic loop: one session running planner, doer and reviewer sub-agents over a spec.md, one task at a time, with the human on the loop rather than in it
- They’ve at least tried parallelising that loop (worktrees etc)
I’ve got about a dozen of these markers. Three of 12 is a hard no, six is a maybe, and 11 is strong signal.
I don’t ask most of these directly. I infer what I can from how they work, then ask open ended probing questions around the gaps. Coverage is often patchy and that’s fine, it’s an emerging space.
Some candidates miss a couple of level three items but have at least toyed with level four in their spare time. Some have every level three item and have never wondered about looping, which tells me something too.
What I’m really looking for is whether they’ve been loving driving their own learning journey in agentic engineering, or just waiting for their current employer to add the tools and ways of working into the SDLC they live within.
Curiosity is very hard to teach to someone who doesn’t have it, but you can rely on being able to teach someone who does just about anything.
Three things I’d change in your next hiring round:
- Cut down (or remove) the stack-fit questions and give that time to agentic practice
- Ask “What has changed most in how you build in the last three months?” and then “What do you think changes in the next three?”
- Ask about the coolest project they’ve worked on, then listen for whether it was cool because they owned it end to end
In 12 months I want every engineer on the team to be thinking like a product engineer (but that’s another whole post for later).