The Boring Future of AI Coding

The article argues that AI coding's realistic future is not 10x engineers but a mundane adaptation aimed only at preventing new failure modes—codebase erosion, rising token costs, comprehension debt, review bottlenecks, and a missing generation of junior engineers. It predicts teams will build "dark lines" (automated fix-and-ship loops) first for security patching and incident remediation, while warning that unsupervised AI churn on a codebase won't survive a year. The piece closes with survival questions for engineers through CEOs, stressing that removing code and features matters more than velocity.