The Engineers Stopped Writing Code. Who Walked In?

Yesterday, someone rebuilt their company website from scratch. The old setup was Angular on the front end, .NET on the back, a full CMS behind it all. The whole thing had been running for years. Change a line of text and you'd need the frontend engineer, the backend engineer, a deployment cycle that could stretch over weeks. They replaced it with a static site generated by AI. No CMS. No database. Hosting cost: zero. Their job title wasn't engineer. Around the same time: Spotify's top engineers have gone months without writing code themselves. The head of Anthropic's Claude Code project says he hasn't written a single line since November 2025. His job is now to hand tasks to AI agents and check the results. At Google, three-quarters of all code is AI-generated. Engineers aren't writing code. Non-engineers are. The two things happened at the same time. The skill isn't disappearing. It's moving. On the engineering side, the execution wall (reading code, making changes by hand) is being absorbed by AI. The job's center of gravity has shifted toward architecture, catching where the AI goes wrong, deciding what's actually worth building. On the other side, a door opened. People who understood the business problems but couldn't reach the technical layer now can. What that person brought to the website rebuild was knowledge of their own company: which features went unused for months, which infrastructure existed because it always had. AI couldn't supply that judgment. But AI gave it somewhere to land. What stops you has changed. It used to be whether you could write code. It's starting to look more like: how well do you understand the problem in front of you? AI handles the execution. You handle the question. That rebuilt site updates a few times a year. Static files, AI-assisted changes, zero hosting cost. The business judgment behind it, what this site actually needs to do: that part, the AI didn't provide.