For most of my career, the specification was the cheap part. You wrote a paragraph, maybe a ticket, and the expensive, skilled, irreplaceable work happened downstream: turning that paragraph into correct code. The spec was a suggestion. The implementation was the truth.
That ratio has inverted, and almost nobody has repriced their work to match.
When an agent can take a precise description of a change and produce a working, tested implementation in minutes, the implementation stops being the bottleneck. It stops being where the skill lives. The skill moves up, to the only place left that the machine cannot do for you: deciding what to build, and stating it precisely enough that the rest is mechanical. The senior engineer doesn't disappear. They get pushed one rung up the ladder, onto the specification.
And here's the part the tooling hasn't caught up to: if implementation is now a compile step, then the specification is a compile target. It's no longer prose you hand to a human who will fill the gaps with judgment. It's a source artifact that gets compiled into a system. And like any source artifact fed to a compiler, it deserves a type checker, a linter, and a build that fails when the input is wrong.
