AI-Augmented Development
AI won't replace developers with a model. It will make the sprint team unnecessary. The usual enterprise team (a product manager, a tech lead, a designer, several developers, QA, a delivery manager and the managers above them) exists mostly to pass work from one specialist to the next. Writing code was rarely the slowest step. Now that AI makes code cheap, the hard part is knowing exactly what to build and checking that what got built is right. When that happens, most of the team's reason to exist goes away. A feature that used to take eight people three sprints can be delivered by two people in about a week.
The paper names the two roles that remain. The AIAD engineer owns a feature from start to finish. They get the real need out of the stakeholder, write the spec, give the model the context it needs, read the generated code with suspicion, ship it and carry the pager. Their partner, the AIAD-QA engineer, helps write the spec and owns the acceptance criteria. They build the test harness, review both the generated code and the generated tests as an adversary, and watch production for drift. When the two disagree, they don't escalate. They point to the spec, and if the spec can't settle it, they sharpen the spec.
At the center of all this is the spec: a testable, versioned description of how a system should behave. It has to be precise enough that anything left open was left open on purpose. It covers intent, interfaces, invariants, acceptance criteria, non-functional requirements, failure modes, operations, scope, constraints and rollout. When generated code is wrong, the first move is to fix the spec, not the code. The code can be regenerated at any time. The spec holds the lasting value: it records business knowledge a competitor can't buy along with the same models.
These roles are harder and better paid, and there will be far fewer of them. The paper argues that the people who fill them are being chosen right now, by which engineers start practicing these skills before the job market has a name for them. It includes a 90-day plan for each role and looks honestly at what this means for management layers, career ladders, pay, hiring and the pipeline for junior engineers. Its advice comes down to one line: start with the spec.