Originally published at tddbuddy.com.
This is the third and final post in the "Vocabulary Is the Product" arc. The first, The Hidden Output of TDD Was Never Code, made the case that naming was always TDD's primary artifact. The second, Agents Amplify Whatever Vocabulary They Find, showed how agents compound both good and bad vocabulary at machine speed. This post names what that means for engineering roles and what teams should do about it.
Product literacy is the engineering skill that didn't get automated, and most teams aren't hiring for it yet.
Product Literacy Was Always the Leaky Part
Every engineering organization in the last thirty years ran on a shared fiction: the translation problem could be divided cleanly.
