For many years now, smart programmers have known that it is a great idea to be 'findable'.
Actually no, that's a cynical take. Great engineers have always known that they are vying for status within their peers and one of the ways status is gained is through helping others.
Actually that's also a cynical take. The best engineers love this shit so much that they will spend their nights on IRC guiding (yelling at) noobs or answering questions on Stack Overflow or blogging about some esoteric quirk in Arch Linux package manager not because they think it's particularly noteworthy but because they know that it might just be that one piece of information that saves someone a week or a career. When we homestead the noosphere, we have to write things down. It is a wild place.
And this has meant that the best engineers have always been findable, to a greater or lesser extent. Of course there exist the neckbearded wizards in their caves who can only be glimpsed by a select few but that's a story for another day.
The best engineers have always been findable if you know where to look. And now its not some dumb HR that's typing in search terms in naukri.com any more. The AI agents are coming for you. Exa.ai just scraped all of linked in and they got a 360 degree view of every working professional on the planet. And that dataset is being scraped by recruiting AIs as we speak. And they need some signal, some sign of life, some small golden shining light to pull them towards you and they will come, in their hordes and they will put you in front of hiring managers if you light up the correct vectors.
Here's just one example of the kind of search that can be done against your digital presence.
The agents are on the prowl. In the Matrix, this was never a good thing but here its the opposite. The swarms, if handled right, have the potential to find the correct roles for the correct people, to build the correct teams for the benefit of all. This is a goal that is higher than full employment. This is a goal of fulfillment and total expression for everyone, regardless of their interests, passion and mission.
If being findable was important before when humans were doing it, it is 10x more important today when agents are trawling the interwebs and making their lists of interesting people.