Something shifted. Not the AI thing – everyone noticed that. What counts as proof.
Used to be your resume, your title, the logo. Still opens doors. But the gap between “I can do X” and “here’s the commit” got wide enough that both sides feel it. A merged PR has a commit hash. A CVE has a number. A library someone depends on has a git log. Credentials got easier to claim. Artifacts didn’t.
Someone with good prompts can ship something that looks like what took years to learn. But craft didn’t get cheaper – can’t prompt your way into three weeks of sitting in a codebase, earning trust, understanding why things are the way they are before suggesting they should be different. The floor moved. The ceiling didn’t.
That gap rewards a specific kind of work. Not breadth – depth. Developer who sits in one codebase long enough to find what the maintainer missed, not the one who skimmed ten repos looking for easy wins. The market still measures breadth because it’s easier to count. The artifacts come from depth.
The hard part isn’t the work though, it’s the middle. Where the work is real but recognition hasn’t caught up. CVE published but the paycheck isn’t from security. Dozen merged PRs but the hiring manager still asks about your last employer. Most people stop here. That’s what makes it a filter – not the skill required, the patience.
The proving ground shifted too. Entry-level job that taught shipping doesn’t exist like it used to, but the maintainer who needs help with open source still does. The ladder moved from companies to communities, and communities can tell who invested the time.
What compounds isn’t the title or the years or the brand. It’s the artifacts. Commit hashes, earned trust, scar tissue from things breaking in production. Everything else is a claim.