I will spare you another treatise on AI, mainly because I’m tired of thinking about it and tired of talking about it. I will say only that while I feel I was directionally correct about many of the points I made, I failed to predict the colossal step change in model and tool capabilities in late 2025. Opus and GPT-5.* introduced a remarkable era of career upheaval and deskilling anxiety among programmers and white collar workers. They also ushered in an era of immense recklessness.

Yusuf Aytas eloquently describes what I’ve been struggling to put into words lately:

A serious engineer with an LLM is dangerous in a good way. They can move faster because they already know what shape the solution should roughly have. They know when to ask the model for a small function, when to ask for tests, when to reject an abstraction, when to stop prompting and write the damn thing themselves. They can look at generated code and feel that something is off, even before they have fully explained why. That feeling is years of scars presenting themselves as magic.

A weak engineer with an LLM is dangerous in the other way. They can now produce more code than they understand, and because it looks polished, nobody notices the gap as quickly. In the past, a weak engineer was often rate-limited by their own speed or amount of stack overflow copy/pastes. Now, bad taste can be expressed at machine speed, wrapped in decent formatting, and sent to review as if we should all be grateful.

And finally:

Quality matters because code is becoming abundant, and when something becomes abundant, the scarce thing becomes more valuable. The scarce thing is judgment and taste. It is the ability to look at something that works and still say, this will hurt us later.

The producing code got cheaper but the ownership did not.

Code is a liability. You can use it to solve problems or create products, but each line of code in service of those pursuits needs to be understood, documented, maintained, and kept secure in perpetuity. Each additional statement is a tiny bit of cement that seals you into your prior assumptions and makes it harder to change course in the future. The most valuable skill a technical person can bring to the table is knowing what not to build.