There's a distinction worth making here. "Nobody cares how you built it" is true. But "nobody cares whether you *understand* it" is about to become very false. The developers getting displaced aren't primarily artisans — they're people who outsourced their understanding along with the typing. The ones who survive aren't the ones who coded everything by hand out of principle. They're the ones who know when the AI is confidently wrong, can read what it generated, and understand why the architecture matters before the bugs show up at 2am. Craft didn't die. It moved upstream. System design, threat modeling, knowing which abstractions are load-bearing — that's where it lives now. The "code monkey" framing cuts both ways: if all you were doing was translating requirements into syntax, yes, that's gone. But if you understood the territory, you're more valuable than ever, because now you can move ten times faster through it. "Now you're free" lands differently depending on whether you built the map or just followed it.