AI made code cheaper. It made judgment more expensive.
As agents handle more of the implementation, domain expertise becomes the scarce skill that determines whether the output is actually correct.
I have worked across enough industries to see the same failure mode repeat: technically valid output can still be operationally wrong. In cross-border payments, a flow can compile, pass tests, and still violate settlement logic, reconciliation rules, or compliance constraints.
AI makes this sharper. The bottleneck is no longer "can we build it." It is "can we recognize when the generated system is subtly wrong."
That is why agentic AI does not reduce senior technical judgment. It raises the cost of not having it.
The best engineers in the AI era will not be the fastest generators. They will be the strongest validators.