Most of what we called software engineering was pattern-application — work that AI now does cheaply. The bundle is dissolving, and what remains is a smaller, distinct activity that deserves the engineering name.
The agentic transition isn't a productivity upgrade for software engineering — it's a phase shift into a management-shaped role most senior ICs explicitly opted out of decades ago.
When implementation labor is commoditized, the practitioner's bottleneck moves from feature prioritization to change management and judgment.
Written in the days after losing my mother — the one person on earth who never let me disappear.
A 2011 essay surveying the arguments for and against U.S. military intervention in Middle East democratization — and why the honest answer resists a single binary.