There's so much focus on "how can AI do my work for me?"
I think the more important question is "what work can I now do with AI that I would have never attempted before?"
Earlier this year I wrote freestiler, a vector tiling engine for R and Python, with the help of Claude and Codex.
I knew what the ideal engine looked like and how it would work at a high level. I didn't know how to put it together, and I don't know Rust, the language I wanted under the hood.
Previously I would never have attempted this project as the ROI wasn't there. It would have taken me a year or more to learn the internals of a vector tiling engine and enough Rust to implement one.
With Opus-level models, I could take it on. freestiler now powers all my vector tiling pipelines, including the map below rendering 143 million jobs from LODES, and it has 114 GitHub stars.
Building this way has required a different set of skills. I don't review the code line by line. I set up adversarial agents to do that and write the test suites. What I review is the architecture, the behavior, and the results. Agent teams surface findings and explain their reasoning; I evaluate and critique. My job isn't to stress over code formatting, but instead to focus on questions like whether the engine is designed right, whether the output is correct, and if the UX makes sense.
This means that I haven't "replaced my work." I've taken on entirely new work, with the help of agents, that I would have never done otherwise.
It has taken some getting used to shipping code I haven't personally typed. In the old way of working, I built understanding through writing that code. Now I build understanding through managing the project - writing a spec, reviewing structure, evaluating UX. And that's helped me think a whole lot bigger in terms of what I can now do.