There is a running joke in hiring right now: we use AI to write resumes, then feed them into an ATS that uses AI to read them.

A perfectly optimized closed loop of noise.

The resume hasn't disappeared. Its signal-to-noise ratio has.

Anyone can generate a polished summary of what they should be able to do. Anyone can rewrite their experience and present themselves better than ever before.

I don't blame candidates. I'd do the same. The problem is production doesn't care what should work.

Anyone who has been paged at 3 AM knows that systems don't fail politely. You don't get a neatly packaged LeetCode question. You get a cascading failure because someone assumed a dependency would never timeout, a database lock nobody planned for, or a deployment that quietly corrupts data.

Those are judgment problems, not syntax problems.

AI Writes Code. Humans Make Decisions.

A few days ago, Matthew McGowan and I were discussing engineering evaluation in an AI-heavy world. He said something...