When Writing Code Is No Longer the Issue, What Is?

AI has fundamentally changed software development, and this is how it happened: gradually, then suddenly. Over the past few years, engineers have been experimenting with AI code, but the latest progress has enabled us to do things we never thought possible before. The recent model upgrades, combined with agentic abilities, now allow developers to produce not just dramatically more code, but dramatically more complex code. In the span of a quarter, my own team went from skeptical experimentation to 90 percent of our code being AI-written. But this isn’t a productivity triumph story. Because when code production becomes fully automated, you get a new set of problems to think about.

The column goes through five of them: accept that the job has changed; velocity without governance equals slop; review is the new bottleneck; the validation loop is the real skill now; and AI drains you faster than you think.

This is an excerpt — the full column was published on Inc.