I Stopped Writing iOS and Started Building the Platform

I used to write iOS for a living — Swift, features, App Store releases. Somewhere in the last two years I stopped, and I barely noticed it happening. The pull was downward: the flaky builds and release bottlenecks that slowed everyone down were more interesting to fix than the next screen, and once I owned the CI/CD, that became the job. The AI era finished the move. I don't hand-write much application code anymore — I describe what I want, pair with an agent, and spend my judgment on the parts that matter: the architecture, the edge cases, whether the thing is actually good. It would be easy to frame that as losing a skill. I think it's closer to changing altitude. The work that keeps 20 developers shipping isn't the feature they see; it's the pipeline they never have to think about. That's where I'm most useful now, and AI is what lets one person hold all of it.