Most teams point AI at producing output. The larger gain is reaching real competence in a new domain faster, without mistaking borrowed answers for understanding.
Meta is spending $145B on AI yet says agents have stalled. The real limit is compounding math, and it decides which workflows you can safely hand to an agent today.
For a while we treated generative AI as a parlour trick with bad hands and a habit of making things up. Five kinds of story ended that phase for me, and raised a harder question than 'will it take my job?'
Working code is becoming cheap. What stays scarce is judgment about what to build and whether it was worth building. That is the engineer worth becoming.
