It’s our job to build the software factory - not just the software. Software engineers maintain the assembly line allowing anyone to prompt for a change and ship immediately.
We set up the infrastructure that makes agents successful. We act proactively through prompts (skills, AGENTS.md, knowledge bases etc). We protect software reactively through automated evaluation (tests, linting, type systems, evals, other AI, etc).
It all keeps the agent on track. Even a stupid model, with fresh context, can work within these constraints and produce a good-enough change. It starts to seem ridiculous to even look at the code. And definitely laughable to ever want to write code.
I disagree. It’s still useful to write code.
Even with Fable-like intelligence humans get value from writing code. Not because agents are worse at coding that humans. But to think directly in the execution environment, not proxied through English.
It’s about attention and understanding. To keep my attention, I must go beyond ‘read code’ like a passive observer of agents from afar. To really connect with the architecture of the system, it helps to truly experience the code. I don’t want your flat 2D system of diffs and patches. From time-to-time, I need the full, 4DX virtual reality experience with pain sensors attached to my nethers to experience what’s happening.