An aspect of my career I have been pondering recently is what it means to provide value in the age of AI. For the last few years, I firmly believed the saying, “You won’t be replaced by AI, but you will be replaced by someone using AI.”
I think there is a deeper layer to this now. You will also be replaced if you only use AI. If your output is just Claude without any extra thought or judgement, then it doesn’t provide more value than anyone running Claude.
- Right-Sized Problem Solving
- Creating a solution that is scoped, without endless AI bloat
- Reliability First
- Taste / Judgement
- Knowing what the customer needs and what is the differentiator for your product
- Communication
- Being able to communicate with leadership, customers, and team members effectively
This is still an in-progress thought and keeps changing and adjusting as models improve. I would recommend reading Learning To Orchestrate AI Agents to think more about how working with agents evolves the requirements for each engineering level.