Honestly I was starting to wonder what, if anything, I could contribute in this weird new world of AI coding. Writing mopey poetry like "We mourn our craft" is great, but at my core, I really want to do deep, novel work that pushes the boundaries of what's possible with software. Having some knowledge of performance, benchmarks, and web frameworks (and where measurements can go wrong) really helps here. Expertise is not dead! But the goalposts have shifted a bit.