The rise of judgement over technical skill

I would argue that this is already true in roles where one supervises the work of another person with skill. Great leaders, for example, were once practitioners. Over time their skills may fade, but their judgment makes them effective and able to the scale their impact.

This echoes my experience with Claude Code. The bottleneck isn't the code generation itself—it's two critical judgment tasks:

1. Problem decomposition: Taking a vague idea and breaking it down into well-defined, context-bounded issues that I can effectively communicate to the AI

2. Code review: Carefully evaluating the generated code to ensure it meets quality standards and integrates properly

Both of these require deep understanding of the domain, the codebase, and good software engineering principles. Ironically, while I can use AI to help with these tasks too, they remain fundamentally human judgment problems that sit squarely on the critical path to quality software.

The technical skill of writing code has been largely commoditized, but the judgment to know what to build and how to validate it remains as important as ever.

I think the reality is that, this notion of "democratising" various technical mediums is used to gloss over that, as countless studies have now evidenced, humans primarily learn and remember well thing by doing things, not merely passively consuming them. Fine-precision decision-making will likely always be the domain of dedicated tooling designed to better correspond with the particular medium or task -- that is, manual testing and experimentation, not relying on logocentric prompt idolatry.

When we get into literature, visual art etc. it becomes more of a problem. You can't get Cormac McCarthies or Mars Voltas from software designed to give you perfect statistical 50% grey, and people who try and hack it without doing the reading, are going to end up writing gibberish. People who actually enjoy and like art, music whatever are going to grow Very bored with the overwhelming majority of work reliant of primarily generative methods, save for those who already have discretion learned through experience of many tools and other means of expression.

Today, if someone uses LLMs for code generation, he/she will probably question the generated code and will put his own judgement above it. I am curious how fast that will change, especially for juniors. When will they start to question their own judgement and just go with the generated code becuase its "more safe"?