You have to beat the models at something

In 2025, I wrote that software engineers ought to be assessed by “value over replacement”: not how much money they made for their company, but how much they would have made compared to the average engineer in their position. I’ve always found it vaguely silly when engineers put “built a product that made $X” on their resumes, when they just did the JIRA tickets that came across their desk. Today, value over replacement is even more important. A replacement-level engineer in the 2010s was fine: maybe not worth promoting, but still worth paying, because writing code had a high fixed cost. Now writing code costs a hundred bucks a month. What are you doing that GPT-5.6-Sol or Claude Opus 5 wouldn’t do in your position? Why is it worth paying an extra two or three orders of magnitude for? This is a scary thought. But you’re not doing yourself any favors by pretending that LLMs can’t actually write code and it’s all just a scam, or that LLM-written code is inherently so bad as to cause…