As AI absorbs the routine typing, value shifts to the skills that decide what to build and whether it's right. These were always important; AI just removes the busywork that used to hide their absence. The throughline is taste and judgment — knowing what good looks like and being able to defend it.
All of these reduce to judgment: the ability to look at an output and tell whether it's actually good — secure, maintainable, correct, appropriate for the context. AI can produce a hundred options; taste is what picks the right one and rejects the rest.
When production of code is cheap, the bottleneck moves to direction and evaluation. The developers who thrive aren't the fastest typists — they're the ones who frame problems well, review rigorously, and have the judgment to know good from merely plausible. Deliberately building these higher-order skills, rather than leaning only on the AI to produce, is what compounds over a career.