The Day Code Became Free
Introducing the Specification Age. AI collapsed the pretense that generation was where the difficulty lived.
Writing
The Specification Age
Three Constraints That Replaced One
The specification bottleneck, the coherence gap, and the trust calibration impossibility.
Comprehension Debt
The liability nobody is accounting for. Code that nobody designed produces systems nobody understands.
The Tautological Testing Trap
The oracle principle quietly breaks when AI writes both the code and the tests. Coverage rises, verification power falls, and the difference is invisible.
Jevons Paradox
Cheaper generation doesn't mean the same code in less time. It means more code, more maintenance, and a self-reinforcing cycle with no natural brake.
When Every Metric Lies
Measurement in the Specification Age. Velocity looks great. The systems are falling apart.
The Expertise Pipeline Is Collapsing
How do you develop engineering judgment when juniors never practice the foundational work?
Solution Monoculture
When every codebase looks the same, the industry loses its capacity for divergent solutions.
Your SDLC Was Designed for a World That No Longer Exists
Processes built around generation as the bottleneck cannot serve a world where specification is.
The Trust Problem Has No Technical Solution
Vigilance degrades with automation. This isn't a character flaw, it's cognitive science.
The Curation Thesis
What engineering becomes next. A framework for when generation is free and specification is everything.
New Roles and Skills for the Specification Age
The skills that always mattered most become the primary skills, not secondary ones.
A Measurement Framework
Building instrumentation for the things that actually matter.
The Practitioner's Manifesto
What to do Monday morning. Concrete, incremental, reversible interventions.
Rebuilding the Onramp
Developing engineers in the AI era when the traditional apprenticeship model is broken.