The Human in the Loop

Summary

Mike Arnaldi wrote a thought-provoking piece titled "The Death of Software Development." I respect Mike a lot. Effect is brilliant work, and his analysis of the current AI moment is sharper than most. But I think he's missing something critical. My Workflow Has Changed Let me be clear: I'm not here to argue that AI isn't transforming our industry. It is. My own workflow has changed dramatically. When an issue lands in my queue today, my first instinct is to throw it at AI. Security vulnerabilities in Node.js or Undici. Bugs in Fastify. New features for Platformatic. AI handles the implementation. I've shipped dozens of fixes this way in the past few months. But here's the thing Mike glosses over: I review every single change. Every behavior modification. Every line that ships. The Bottleneck Has Shifted Mike writes that he built a Polymarket analysis tool in 2 hours, writing zero lines of code, reviewing zero lines of code. He presents this as a triumph. I see it differently. My ability to ship is no longer limited by how fast I can code. It's limited by my skill to review. And I think that's exactly how it should be. When I fix a security vulnerability, I'm not just checking if the tests pass. I'm asking: does this actually close the attack vector? Are there edge cases the AI missed? Is this the right fix, or just a fix? When I ship a new feature, I need to understand if it fits the architecture, if it maintains backward compatibility, if it's something I can stand behind. The moment I stop reviewing is the moment I stop being responsible for what I ship. The Bloomberg Terminal Question Mike asks: "If an idiot like me can clone a product that costs $30k per month in two hours, what even is software development?" I'd ask a different question: who's responsible when that clone has a bug that causes someone to make a bad trade? Who understands the edge cases? Who can debug it when it breaks in production at 3 AM? The Bloomberg Terminal isn't expensive because the code...