A model wrote most of a service I shipped this month. Reading it took twenty minutes. Deciding I was willing to put my name on it took the rest of the day.
That ratio is the whole post.
Writing code was never the expensive part. Owning it is. I’ve been in this trade long enough to remember when typing was a real bottleneck. It stopped being one around the time autocomplete got good, and nobody noticed, because we kept measuring engineers by output. Lines, tickets, velocity. Proxies for the cheapest activity in the building.
The cost sat somewhere else. In the pager at 3am. In the migration against forty million rows that must not take the business offline. In the review where you say no to a colleague you like. In the decision to kill a service, knowing you will answer for it in a year, when the person who asked has left.
None of that is typing. All of it is ownership.
Take the pipeline of building anything and mark what the model touched. Figuring out what to build: unchanged. The model can list options, it cannot want anything, and it has no stake in being wrong. Writing it: minutes. Verifying it under real load with real data: unchanged, arguably worse, there is more to verify now. Operating it at 3am: unchanged. Getting anyone to care that it exists: unchanged, and harder every month.
One stage out of five went to zero. We behave as if it was the other four.
The output is only as good as the person driving. A senior asks for a service and reads the generated code for the failure modes nobody mentioned: the partial write, what the retry does downstream, whether that innocent loop holds a connection open under load. A junior asks for the same service, gets the same code, and sees that it compiles. Same tool, same prompt, very different artifact leaving the building. The value was never in the generation. It was in the reading. And reading is a skill you build the slow way, by owning things that broke.
The tool everyone called a leveller mostly widened the gap. Friction was a filter. We removed it and replaced it with nothing. If your judgment is good, you now ship at a speed that looked absurd three years ago. If it isn’t, you generate the wrong thing faster, in volume, with more confidence.
AI made the writing free. It made nothing else free. The price of not knowing what you are doing just went up.