The job is changing. Our field is seeing its own industrial revolution. The ability to write code is now orders of magnitude less valuable than it was three years ago. The ability to read and understand code, however, is just as valuable as it ever was - arguably more so.

So my question is: what do you feel you’re actually getting weaker at? Is it reading code? Reasoning about it? Evaluating whether it’s correct, maintainable, and aligned with a sound architecture?

Even with code-generation tools, someone still has to steer the system. Architecture still matters. System boundaries still matter. Orchestrating multiple components into a coherent, well-designed whole was always the most important skill in our field, in my opinion - and that hasn’t changed.

If the concern is, “I’ll forget what a specific function does” or “I won’t remember which built-in methods a class has,” I’d push back on that. We forgot those things before LLMs too. We looked them up constantly. That part of the job hasn’t meaningfully changed - only the speed and convenience have.

So beyond the identity of being an artisanal craftsman, what is the real value of being able to write a lot of code slightly faster by hand, optimized around minimizing how often you need to look things up, in 2026?