AI has made writing code cheap. Verification, trusted context and human judgment are now the scarce resources, and teams that redesign their lifecycle around them will pull away from teams that only add assistants.
Platform-embedded, sandboxed and evolutionary coding agents each earn trust in a different way. Then the editor became a fleet manager. Choose and govern agents by how their work will be verified.
For complex work in regulated sectors, prompt-to-code cannot pass an audit. Making the specification the contract an AI must fulfil can, provided the spec stays anchored to the code and machines check conformance.