The visible change is speed: a working prototype that took a week now takes an afternoon. The invisible change is that the expensive parts moved.
What got cheaper
- Boilerplate, scaffolds and glue code.
- Test skeletons and fixture data.
- Learning an unfamiliar API by example.
What did not
Deciding what to build, designing data models that survive change, and debugging behaviour that only appears under load. These are judgement problems, and generated code adds surface area to them.
The new failure mode
Code that works and nobody understands. It compiles, passes the tests, and becomes unmaintainable in six months. Review discipline matters more now, not less.
What good teams do
They keep the generated portion small and typed, they insist on tests they can read, and they refuse to merge anything a person cannot explain line by line.
Bottom line: AI compresses typing, not thinking. Plan accordingly.
