Your organization treats code output as progress.
Your organization rewards speed and calls it seniority.
That belief used to feel safe.
LLMs turned it into a liability.
This is not about juniors losing jobs.
This is about seniors losing cover.
The belief competent teams are proud of
"We ship fast because we are good."
That sentence used to signal excellence.
Today, it hides risk.
Before LLMs, effort was visible.
Typing speed created friction.
Friction forced thinking.
Now output is cheap.
Suspiciously cheap.
A prompt becomes a diff.
A diff becomes a merge.
A merge becomes production.
Everyone feels productive.
Almost no one feels responsible.
What LLMs actually removed
LLMs did not remove engineering jobs.
They removed the last requirement to understand what you ship.
You no longer need to know why something works.
You only need to recognize that it looks right.
That is not correctness.
That is plausibility.
Plausible code compiles.
Plausible code passes tests.
Plausible code fails users quietly.
Most teams already tolerated this.
LLMs just multiplied the volume.
Code review became theater
Every team says they have standards.
Most teams mean templates.
Templates do not encode judgment.
They encode repetition.
When repetition becomes the quality bar, review collapses.
"LGTM" stops meaning I understand this.
It starts meaning I do not want to slow things down.
Silence becomes approval.
Approval becomes liability.
This is not a tooling problem.
It is a system design problem.
The hidden dependency no one names
Your delivery process depends on ownership.
Your organization optimized it away.
Responsibility is spread until it disappears.
No single person must fully understand a change for it to ship.
That worked when code was expensive.
It fails when code is free.
After the incident, everyone asks the same question.
How did this get approved.
The answer is always the same.
Quiet. Distributed. Nobody.
Do not blame the wrong thing
Do not blame the junior who pasted the output.
They followed the incentives.
Do not blame the model.
It did exactly what you asked.
Look at what actually changed.
The bottleneck is no longer writing code.
It is reading code.
If you cannot read unfamiliar code deeply, you cannot evaluate AI output.
If you cannot evaluate it, you cannot approve it responsibly.
Approving without understanding is not leadership.
It is negligence at scale.
What matters more now, not less
System design matters more because implementation is cheap.
Communication matters more because diffs are larger.
Domain knowledge matters more because outputs are generic.
Problem decomposition matters more because prompts are vague.
None of this is new.
What is new is that you can no longer hide from it.
LLMs reward teams with discipline.
They punish teams that outsourced thinking to process.
The uncomfortable career truth
Staying relevant is not about learning the next model.
It is about being the person who prevents bad decisions from shipping.
That person does not compete on output.
They compete on responsibility.
They can explain tradeoffs without rereading the diff.
They can name failure modes before users do.
They can say no when something works but is wrong.
If your career plan is "use AI better", you are late.
The real question is whether you are still practicing engineering.
Which parts of your delivery process allow unknown decisions to reach production, and who decided that was acceptable?
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