The Software Factory Floor

Software development is becoming a factory. And you're not the line worker anymore.

The Craftsman Era

Not long ago, software development was artisanal work. A developer took a problem from napkin sketch to production. You wrote the code, debugged it, deployed it, maintained it. The craft was in the doing — your fingers on the keyboard, your mind tracing through logic, your intuition built from thousands of hours of making things break and making them work again.

We romanticized this. The 10x developer. The wizard who could hold entire systems in their head. The lone hacker building empires from a basement.

That era is ending.

The Assembly Line Arrives

AI is the new line worker.

Not a metaphor — a reality. When I write code today, I describe intent and an AI generates implementation. It writes the functions, handles the boilerplate, implements the patterns. Fast. Tireless. Consistent. It doesn't get bored. It doesn't make typos (well, different kinds). It works at 3 AM without complaint.

This isn't a tool that makes developers faster. It's a fundamental restructuring of who does what.

The line worker does the doing. The repetitive, pattern-matching, implementation work. The translation from spec to code. This is what AI excels at — and what humans find tedious.

The Human Shift

So what's left for us?

We become line supervisors.

Your job is no longer doing the work. It's:

Quality Control — Code review becomes your primary technical activity. Not reviewing for syntax or style (AI handles that), but for intent. Does this solution actually solve the problem? Does it account for the edge cases that matter? Does it fit the system's architecture?

Direction Setting — Architecture, design, strategy. The "what" and "why" that precedes any "how." AI can implement a solution; it can't tell you if you're solving the right problem.

Exception Handling — When the AI hits a wall — novel problems, ambiguous requirements, conflicting constraints — the human steps in. You're the escalation path.

Taste — Knowing what good looks like. This might be the hardest thing to teach and the most valuable thing to have.

Write It Down: The New Core Skill

Here's what changes everything: documentation becomes the primary interface between human intent and AI execution.

In a factory, you have blueprints. Specifications. Standard operating procedures. The line worker doesn't guess what to build — they follow the spec.

AI is your line worker. And vague verbal instructions make for shoddy products.

This means the skills that matter aren't the ones we've traditionally valued:

Design Thinking — Before any code exists, you need to understand the problem space. Who are the users? What are the constraints? What does success look like? This thinking must be written down — not held in your head, not discussed in a meeting and forgotten, but documented.

Problem Decomposition — Breaking complex systems into components that can be specified, built, and tested independently. The AI can implement a well-defined piece; it struggles with ambiguous wholes.

Specification Writing — Clear, unambiguous descriptions of behavior. What should happen when X occurs? What are the inputs and outputs? What are the edge cases? The quality of your AI's output directly correlates with the quality of your spec.

Decision Documentation — Why did we choose this approach over that one? What tradeoffs did we accept? Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) aren't bureaucratic overhead anymore — they're how you maintain system coherence when no single person writes all the code.

The developer who can't write clearly becomes a supervisor who can't supervise. They're shouting instructions across a noisy factory floor and wondering why the products come out wrong.

The New Core Competencies

Resiliency thinking. Efficiency optimization. System design. Failure mode analysis.

These were always important. Now they're central.

When AI handles implementation, the human's value is in what AI can't do:

Anticipate failure modes that aren't in the training data
Optimize for business constraints that aren't in the requirements
Balance technical debt against delivery pressure
Navigate organizational politics and human dynamics
Make judgment calls with incomplete information

None of these are about writing code. All of them require thinking that must be captured, communicated, and preserved.

Write. It. Down.

Not because documentation is virtuous. Because documentation is how you do your job now. It's the spec sheet for the factory floor. It's the quality standard your output is measured against. It's the institutional memory that lets the next supervisor pick up where you left off.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Not everyone gets to be a supervisor.

Factory floors have fewer supervisors than line workers. If AI takes the line worker role, do we need as many developers? The honest answer: probably not as many doing what developers have traditionally done.

The people who thrive will be the ones who adapt — who recognize that the job has changed and who embrace the new shape of it. Design thinkers. Clear writers. System architects. Quality obsessives.

The people who cling to "I write code" as their identity will struggle. Not because code doesn't matter, but because writing it is increasingly not the human's job.

What Now?

If you're a developer today, start shifting:

Practice specification writing. Next time you build something, write the spec first. Make it clear enough that someone else — human or AI — could implement it without asking questions.
Get better at code review. Not style nits. Substance. Does this solve the problem? Does it handle the edges? Does it fit the system?
Document your decisions. When you make an architectural choice, write down why. Your future self (and your AI assistants) will thank you.
Think in systems. How do the pieces fit together? Where are the failure points? What happens at scale?
Embrace "Write It Down" as philosophy. If it's not written, it doesn't exist. Your thinking, your decisions, your designs — all of it.

The factory floor isn't a demotion. It's a different job. And like the shift from craftsman to industrial designer, it requires different skills, different habits, different ways of creating value.

The question isn't whether this shift is happening. It's whether you're ready for it.

The best time to adapt was yesterday. The second best time is now.