I’ve been using AI coding agents enough that the shift is becoming obvious: I’m spending less time writing code and more time deciding what should be built, giving the agent context, and reviewing what comes back.
The bottleneck hasn’t disappeared. It has moved.
My rule is simple: don’t ship code you can’t explain.
I wrote a longer piece about why I think the developer’s job is moving up a layer, and why judgement matters more as code generation gets cheaper.
Writing Code Is No Longer the Hard Part
alsonkaw.com
AI can generate code quickly. The harder part of development is increasingly defining intent, providing context and knowing whether the result is good.
