Staying ahead of the models is a moving target. At the start of 2026, “make working changes to large codebases” was in this category, but now it’s not. For this reason, I doubt that you can retreat to some “hard engineering” area that requires deeper expertise. That might work in the short term, but not forever. If LLMs can find a better lower bound on the Riemann hypothesis, they will soon1 be able to write solid high-performance kernel drivers or GPU shaders or whatever.

Brilliant advice for dealing with slop from your coworkers.

In this sense, prompts are a worse form of technical debt than code. When technical debt blows up, it usually causes errors or a tangible slowdown as you try to understand the code. Prompts will decay silently. Also, even janky code tends to be relatively stable when untouched, but every single model upgrade could turn a functional prompt into a non-functional one.