Justin Smestad

Everyone assumes AI will replace most jobs within a year. The technology might be ready, but the economics aren’t. Data centers, power grids, and component costs don’t follow Moore’s Law. When demand outstrips infrastructure, token prices go up, and companies start doing the math on AI versus people.

AI makes ‘one more prompt’ irresistible. The next feature is always ten minutes away. The hardest engineering skill in the age of AI isn’t building. It’s deciding when to ship.

AI makes writing code so cheap that iterative enhancement stops making sense. Instead of refining small slices, teams are regenerating entire features and iterating on the whole thing. Agile isn’t dead, but its assumptions are bending hard.

After maintaining an authentication library with 125 million downloads for over a decade, here’s what I learned about the real cost of auth: it’s not the build, it’s the maintenance nobody plans for. And no, an AI agent monitoring your dependencies isn’t the answer.

AI made code cheap. The bottleneck was never the code. It was scoping, estimation, and communication, the skills teams treated as optional for years. That bet no longer pays off.