For most of my career, the bar for “good engineer” was: writes good code, fast. The bar moved.
I haven’t authored an implementation PR in months. The agents do that. What I do is: read diffs, ask questions, reject shapes, name patterns, write architecture, write retrospectives, set direction.
This used to feel like a demotion. Now it feels like the job.
The agents are better at code than I am, in volume terms. They are not better at judging whether the code is the right code. That gap is widening, not closing. My role is to live in the gap.