> If they can ship code that matches a spec, why does it matter if they’re using ai or not?

I am perfectly capable of writing specs, and feeding them to 3 separate copies of Claude Code all by myself. Then I task switch between the tmux windows based on voice messages from the pack of Claudes. This workflow is fine for some things, and deeply awful for others.

Basically, if a developer is just going to take my spec and hand it to Claude Code, then they're providing zero value. I could do that myself, and frequently do.

The actual bottleneck is people who can notice, "The god object is crumbling under the weight of managing 6 separate concerns with insufficient abstraction." Or "Claude has created 5 duplicate frameworks for deploying the app on Docker. We need to simplify this down to 1 or we're in hell." I will happy fight to hire people who can do the latter work. But those people can all solve fizzbuzz in their sleep.

People who just "ship code that matches a spec" without understanding the technical details are providing close to zero value right now.

There is an interesting niche for people with deep knowledge of customer workflows who can prompt Claude Code. These people can't build finished products using Claude. But they can iterate rapidly on designs until they find a hit. Which we can then fix using people with deeper engineering knowledge and taste.

But if you're not bringing either deep customer knowledge or actual engineering knowledge, you're not adding much these days.