Your new job is quality assurance

The bottleneck moved.

It used to be creation. How fast can you write this function, build this feature, solve this problem. Your output was limited by your typing speed, your ability to recall syntax, how many edge cases you could hold in your head at once.

Now the bottleneck is judgment. The AI generates five implementations in the time it would have taken you to write one. Your job is figuring out which one is right, what's wrong with the others, and what it missed entirely.

This is a different skill set.

Reading is not writing in reverse. You need to spot subtle bugs in code you didn't write. Understand architectural decisions you didn't make. Evaluate tradeoffs in approaches you wouldn't have considered. All while the AI is generating the next batch.

Most developers aren't good at this. We never had to be. Code review was something you did after the work was done, not the primary work itself.

I write software and solve technical problems for a living. I haven't seen my work change this much, in such a short time, ever. Not because the AI writes perfect code. It doesn't. But because what I spend my time on is completely different.

The dangerous part is the illusion of productivity.

You can ship ten times more code with AI assistance. Doesn't mean you should. Doesn't mean it's better. Just means you have ten times more surface area for things to go wrong. I've seen teams velocity themselves into unmaintainable messes because they optimized for output instead of review.

The AI will write whatever you ask for. It won't tell you the request was bad in the first place.

The best developers are slowing down. They're using AI to explore possibilities, then taking time to think about which possibility actually solves the problem. The mediocre ones are speeding up, shipping everything the AI suggests, congratulating themselves on their productivity.

Six months from now, you'll be able to tell which team was which by looking at their codebase.

If the primary skill becomes review, and you never write code because the AI is faster, when do you develop judgment? You can't review code well if you don't know how to write it. But if the AI always writes it for you, you never build the pattern recognition that lets you spot what's wrong.

That's not a rhetorical question. That's the actual problem.

I'm watching people who've been reviewing AI-generated code for months start to lose the ability to notice certain classes of bugs. Not because they're bad developers. Because if you never write the code yourself, you stop internalizing the edge cases. You stop building the muscle memory that makes you go "wait, that doesn't look right" when you see something subtle.

Treat AI-generated code the way you'd treat code from someone very fast who doesn't understand the broader system.

It might be perfect. It might have a subtle bug that won't surface until production. Your job is knowing the difference. And if you can't tell the difference, you're not ready for the AI to be writing your code.

The skill that matters now isn't how much code you can generate. It's how quickly you can evaluate what gets generated and decide what's worth shipping. That's a harder skill to develop than writing code fast. And it's the one nobody's teaching.