What's actually happening is that the role of the developer is starting to differentiate really rapidly into at least three distinct tracks, each of them having different skill requirements, different compensation dynamics, and very different career trajectories.
Track 1: ORCHESTRATOR. This is sort of like the strong DM model where the developer does not write code, but specifies outcomes and manages the intelligence that produces those outcomes. The core skills are system design, specification writing, quality evaluation, and token economics. These developers think in terms of agent architectures, context windows, eval frameworks, cost per outcome.
They're effectively factory managers with intelligence. Their value scales with the volume of intelligence that they can direct, which means their compensation is probably going to correlate with token budgets long term rather than lines of code. This track tends to favor people who are very, very good at decomposing problems, who can write precise specs, and who can evaluate output quality really carefully. And those are skills that overlap with but are not identical to traditional software engineering.
Track 2 is more like the SYSTEMS BUILDER. This is someone who has to build the infrastructure that the orchestrators use, the agent frameworks, the evaluation pipelines, the context managers, management systems, the routing layers that send the right task to the right model at the right cost. This is very deep technical work. It's closer to traditional systems engineering than to application development, but with an entirely new stack. So these developers need to understand model behavior at really a mechanical level, how context windows affect output quality, how different architectures handle different task types, how to build reliable systems on top of probabilistic components. This track is much smaller in volume and much more specialized, but the compensation ceiling is super high because the leverage they wield is company wide. It's enormous.
Track 3 is the DOMAIN TRANSLATOR. This is the track that almost nobody is talking about, and it may be the largest of the three. These are the developers, or increasingly the non-developers, who combine enough technical fluency to work with the AI systems. And enough deep domain expertise to know which problems are worth solving in a specific market.
ClaudeCode