Software engineering changes a blur

I have been a software engineer for more than 20 years, and I have lived through a few big shifts: the move to the web, agile, cloud, DevOps, and mobile. None of them felt like this. The changes brought on by agentic development have caused a blur in how software is created and rolled out.

It used to be a sequence

For most of my career, building software had a recognisable rhythm. You understood the problem, designed something, wrote the code, reviewed it, tested it, and shipped it. Each step had owners, tools and habits, and each one took real time.

Now the steps overlap

With agents in the loop, those steps no longer sit neatly one after the other. An idea can become a working change in the time it used to take to write the ticket. Design, coding, testing and review happen at the same time, often in the same conversation.

That is exciting, but it is also disorienting. The boundaries I used to rely on to know where I was in the process have gone soft.

What feels different

• Speed of iteration. Trying three approaches is now cheaper than debating one.
• The shape of the work. Less typing, more directing, reviewing and deciding.
• Rollout. When creating changes gets faster, the bottleneck moves to confidence: how do we know it is safe to ship?
• Tooling churn. What counts as good practice is shifting month to month.

What has not changed

The fundamentals still matter. Clear thinking about the problem, small and reversible changes, good tests, and caring about the people who use and maintain the software. If anything, experience matters more when the code is cheap and the judgement is not.

Where I am landing

I do not have this figured out. Right now I am trying to stay curious, keep my standards for quality where they were, and be honest about what I do not yet know. The blur will settle into new habits eventually. Until then, I will keep writing about it here.