The developer becomes an editor

When software can write itself, the scarce skill moves from producing code to judging it.

There is a familiar anxiety that when machines write the code, the people who used to write it become surplus. We think the more likely outcome is stranger and more interesting: the work does not disappear, it changes shape. The developer stops being a typist and becomes an editor.

Generating a plausible function is now cheap. Generating the right function, the one that fits the system, fails safely, and will still make sense to a colleague in two years, is not. As the cost of producing code falls toward zero, the value migrates to the judgments that production cannot supply: what to build, how to structure it, which of ten plausible answers is actually correct, and what to refuse to ship at all.

Taste at scale

Editing has always been the higher-paid half of writing, and for the same reason. Anyone can fill a page; the discipline is knowing what to cut. The engineer who can read a thousand machine-generated lines and instantly see the one that will page someone at three in the morning is worth more in this world, not less. Their leverage goes up precisely because the raw material got cheap.

This reshapes the team. Small groups of strong editors will out-build large groups of average producers, because the bottleneck is no longer how fast you can type but how well you can decide. The companies we find most compelling have already internalised this. They are not hiring to grow headcount; they are hiring for judgment and letting the machines handle the volume.

The skill that survives is the one that was always the point. Not the keystrokes, but the discernment behind them.