In a recent essay, engineering leader Charity Majors highlights a crucial inflection that occurred in 2025: artificial intelligence made code production essentially free and instantaneous. For decades, code generation was expensive and time-consuming—a major bottleneck. Now it's not. But Majors argues this abundance actually demands *more* engineering discipline, not less. When code becomes disposable and regenerable on demand, the real challenge shifts. It's no longer about speed of output; it's about ensuring what gets built is maintainable, correct, and won't create mountains of technical debt. That requires more thoughtful upstream decision-making: *what* problems are worth solving, and *why*. Rigor hasn't become less important—it's just moved to where it matters most.

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