What "functional" Looks Like Now

You're functional when you can:

DESCRIBE A PROBLEM in language precise enough that someone else (human or AI) can solve it. You can write a one-page PRD. You can write a feature spec with requirements, edge cases, and out-of-scope items.

READ CODE WELL ENOUGH TO REVIEW IT. You can spot when a generated function is missing an edge case, when a generated query touches the wrong table, when a generated component violates the design tokens.

GIT YOUR WAY OUT OF TROUBLE. You can branch, commit, diff, merge, revert. You don't lose work when an agent does the wrong thing.

CHOOSE THE RIGHT TOOL. You know when to use a frontier model and when to use a local one. You know when to write code by hand and when to generate it. You know when not to use AI at all.

VERIFY YOUR OWN WORK. You have a habit of checking happy paths, edge cases, and failure modes before shipping. You don't ship code you haven't run.

PROTECT WHAT NEEDS PROTECTING. You don't put secrets in prompts. You don't send regulated data to consumer chat interfaces. You think about privacy before you think about features.

RECOGNIZE WHAT YOU CAN'T SHIP ALONE. You know what AFD code is (§1.4) and you know when to stop and bring in a senior developer, a licensed professional, or a domain expert who is liable for the result.

RUN IT WHILE YOU SLEEP. You can deploy something that survives a reboot, restarts on crash, and tells you when it's broken.

CONTRIBUTE. You've shared a template, answered a question, or shipped something someone else used.

If you can do all nine, you're functional.

If you can do all nine and you're a roofer, you have a business with half the office overhead of your competitors.

If you can do all nine and you're a small business owner, you have a team multiplier that lets you compete with companies five times your size.

If you can do all eight and you came in from v1, you're an engineer. You may not call yourself one. You may not have the title. But the work you do — describing problems, generating solutions, verifying output, shipping working software — is engineering. Don't let anyone tell you it isn't.

The skill that mattered five years ago was typing fast. The skill that matters now is thinking clearly. v1 of Internet Menace taught you enough to read what the machine writes. v2 — Internet Menace, Again — teaches you to direct it.

Now go build something.

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