Engineering

What stops working

Line-by-line authorship as the centre of the job. The inner loop produces at a rate no human can type at or inspect by hand; an engineer who tries to read every line becomes the new bottleneck — a human gate on a machine shaft.

What it becomes

Two crafts move to the centre. First, specification: a failing test handed to the inner loop is machined intent — executable, unambiguous, ungameable by confident prose. TDD was always philosophically right and economically awkward; the economics have reversed, and tests become the team's core act of authorship rather than its hygiene. Second, verification: code review transforms from correctness-checking into intent-and-architecture editorship — does this change do what was meant, fit what exists, and avoid what was forbidden? The work is closer to editing than inspecting: someone with taste, holding the standard, whose judgment is visible in everything that ships. Neither craft replaces the engineer's oldest judgment: choosing the architecture, constraining the blast radius, designing for evolvability, and owning what happens in production. The machine shaft generates against those constraints; it does not choose them.

The strongest objection

That this makes engineering joyless — inspectors, not builders. Contested as destiny: the craft described is editorship, not inspection, and authorship moves up, not away.