The hard part of writing software has never been the writing. It was building a working model of the domain in your head first. Before you could ship a payroll system you had to understand garnishments and pre-tax deductions and what happens when someone’s pay period straddles a rate change. Before you could ship a transit app you had to learn what a GTFS feed is, why a trip and a route aren’t the same thing, and how a bus that’s “on time” can still be wrong. The code was a transcription of that understanding. Acquiring the understanding was the job.

Agentic AI severed the link between the two. You can now produce the software without ever building the model, and that breaks an assumption the whole profession was organized around.

The standard take, including my own from last year , is that these tools amplify senior developers because senior developers have judgment. True, but incomplete.…