AI didn’t remove engineering work. It moved the hard part somewhere else.

Everyone keeps talking about AI making developers faster. I think that’s true, but also incomplete. AI has made writing code cheaper. But it has made the “before and after” work more important: knowing exactly what to ask for giving enough context catching wrong assumptions checking edge cases deciding what should actually ship cleaning up code that “works” but doesn’t belong in the system So the job didn’t disappear. It shifted from typing code to steering, reviewing, and integrating work. The weird part is that a lot of teams are treating AI-generated code like finished work, when it is really closer to a very fast first draft. That might be fine for prototypes. But in a real codebase, the expensive part was never only writing the code. It was making sure the change fits the system. Curious how others feel about this: Has AI actually reduced your engineering workload, or has it just moved the workload into review, context-setting, and cleanup?