When Code Becomes Cheap, What’s Left?
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A developer reflects on using an AI coding agent (Claude Opus with a spec-driven tool called GSD) to dramatically accelerate feature delivery. The team went from months-long estimates to weeks of actual work, with the shortest pickup-to-PR time being 21 minutes. The unexpected outcome: writing code stopped being the bottleneck — review and QA became the constraint instead. The author also candidly describes the emotional experience of grief as a seasoned developer watching an agent handle the craft they'd spent decades building. The core takeaway is that judgment, code review quality, and knowing what 'good' looks like are now the primary developer skills, not initial code generation.
