'Codegen Was the Tutorial Level': An Argument That 60–70% of the Developer Job Is What Agents Still Can't Do

The Vibe Father·low signal

A July 25 essay argues the next competitive axis is not code volume but requirements, integration, verification, security and production ownership — estimated at 60–70% of the remaining job. It offers a readiness table: boilerplate feature slices with tests are high-readiness, legacy modernization maps and incident-response drafts medium, threat modeling low-to-medium, and cross-company contract negotiation almost entirely human. The concrete prescription is to raise the definition of done inside the harness itself — tests, observability hooks, operator docs, rollback notes — because 'if your definition of done is code compiles, agents will flood you with compiled debt.' Single-source opinion piece, but the readiness taxonomy is directly usable.