Software development is moving from “can you write the code?” to “can you make the right system exist?”

I think the endless “AI slop” argument is obscuring the more important transition happening in software. Code generation is getting cheaper. That does not make engineering disappear. It changes which part of engineering is scarce. When implementation is expensive, knowing how to manually produce implementation carries a lot of value. When implementation becomes dramatically cheaper, value moves toward problem definition, architecture, constraints, verification, security, testing, systems thinking and judgment. That is why I think blanket dismissal of AI-assisted software is going to age badly. Yes, generative systems can produce terrible code faster than humans can. That is a real problem. But the rational response is stronger quality control, not pretending the productivity gain is fake. A strong engineer with agents can potentially explore more designs, automate more tests, inspect more code paths, refactor faster and iterate more aggressively than the same engineer working manually. A weak engineer can also create a disaster faster. Both statements can be true. The important shift is that “I can type the implementation” becomes less differentiating. “I can specify, supervise, validate and own the resulting system” becomes more differentiating. That is uncomfortable because some professional identity was attached to the old bottleneck. But technological progress does not preserve bottlenecks because people built status around them. The people I would bet on are not the pure vibe coders and not the AI refusers. It is the experienced engineers who aggressively adopt the tools while raising their verification standards at the same time.