ACI-006: The Generation Trap

Thesis

When the time cost of writing code approaches zero, the natural response is to write more of it, and that is the wrong response, because agentic coding moves value from implementation (how) to judgement (why and what). Developers who answer cheaper code with more code become prolific generators of output that nobody has evaluated, curated or connected to a real need, so the scarce skill is knowing what is worth building.

Story

MeetZaya was a career co-pilot tool built with Elixir and Phoenix over 12 months. It sits outside the repositories this course re-measures, so its story and its figures here are illustrative, told from the developer's own account. The developer, an experienced engineer and entrepreneur, had recently started using agentic coding tools, and the first experience was intoxicating.