Writing Code Was the Easy Part

I was on a call recently when someone asked how much of our code was written by AI. One of the devs replied 100%. Confident, and a correct answer, but it kind of misses the point and is the wrong thing to measure. The person asking wasn’t an engineer. He’s smart and pays attention, and vibe-codes out prototypes himself. But in his mind, the new model is that you tell the AI what you want, and it builds it. He assumed that the work would move downstream to testing, QA, and reviewing the output. The work didn’t just move downstream, it moved upstream as well. To get the result that you want from the AI, you must know what you want with a specificity that wasn’t needed before. The act of thinking about and writing the specification doc has expanded. So you might spend 20 minutes working with the AI to specify exactly what you want, flushing out questions and leaving no ambiguity. Then you hit enter. The AI writes the code. This is the part non-tech people see, not the preparation work of…