Comment by sublinear

> deciding what to build and catching when things go sideways

I feel like this was always true. Business still moves at the speed of high-level decisions.

> The uncomfortable part: if your value was being the person who could grind through tedious work, that's no longer a moat.

Even when junior devs were copy-pasting from stackoverflow over a decade ago they still had to be accountable for what they did. AI is ultimately a search tool, not a solution builder. We will continue to need junior devs. All devs regardless of experience level still have to push back when requirements are missing or poorly defined. How is picking up this slack and needing to constantly follow up and hold people's hands not "grinding through tedious work"?

AI didn't change anything other than how you find code. I guess it's nice that less technical people can now find it using their plain english ramblings instead of needing to know better keywords? AI has arguably made these search results worse, the need for good docs and examples even more important, and we've all seen how vibecoding goes off the rails.

The best code is still the least you can get away with. The skill devs get paid for has always been making the best choices for the use case, and that's way harder than just "writing code".