I stopped writing most of my code. I didn't stop engineering.

A sample article in your voice. Rewrite it with your own story: the moment it clicked, what you were building, what surprised you.

I started as a backend developer. APIs, queues, databases: the parts nobody sees until they break. Then I moved up the stack, because I wanted to build whole things, from the schema to the button people click.

Today, most of the code I ship is written by AI. I spend my time somewhere else.

The typing was never the job

For years I thought my value was in how fast and how well I could write code. It turns out that was the part easiest to hand over. What's left is everything around it:

• Deciding what the system should do, and what it shouldn't.
• Drawing the boundaries: which service owns which data, what talks to what.
• Planning for failure before it happens.
• Reading every line that ships and asking, would I have written this?

Specs are the new source code

When AI writes the implementation, the spec is where the engineering happens. A vague spec gets you confident, plausible, wrong code. A clear one, with the constraints, the edge cases and the things that must never happen, gets you something you can trust.

## Rate limiter
- Per API key, 100 requests per minute, sliding window.
- Must never block a request because Redis is down: fail open, log loudly.
- Return 429 with a Retry-After header.

That block took me ten minutes to write. The code took the AI thirty seconds. The ten minutes were the job.

What stays the same

Judgement. Taste. Knowing when something is good enough, and when "it works" isn't. Those came from years of writing code by hand, and they're the reason I can direct an AI well now.

I don't miss the typing. I'd miss the thinking.