The Six Stages
Each box shows how much of the stage is realistically automatable by prompt-driven tools today. Click or tab into a stage to see what AI handles versus where a human still earns their salary.
The Commoditization Slider
Drag AI capability forward and watch which parts of the pipeline get eaten first — and which parts barely move, because they depend on context, trust, and taste rather than syntax.
Squishy Skills Self-Assessment
Rate yourself honestly on the five skills that compound as code generation gets cheap. Then copy your result and share it.
Why the Squishy Stuff Wins
A pipeline is a promise, not a script. The code answers "how do rows move." A human answers "which rows matter, to whom, at what cost, and what happens when the promise breaks at 3 a.m." Prompt-generated SQL cannot negotiate an SLA with a skeptical finance team, notice that a metric definition quietly changed meaning after a product launch, or decide that a $40k/month warehouse bill is buying nothing. Requirements gathering, data modeling judgment, cost accountability, incident communication, and stakeholder trust are the durable moat — precisely because they are hard to specify in a prompt.