Former White House AI advisor Dean Ball:
Most people, going about their day, do not think about how “causing bespoke software engineering to occur” might improve their lives or allow them to achieve some objective. They think of “software engineering,” when they think of it at all, as something altogether distinct from what they do. Of course if you have deeply internalized the general-purpose nature of “software,” and especially, “things achievable by well-orchestrated computers,” you understand that in some important sense, almost all human endeavor can be aided, in some way or another, by software engineering. A great deal of it can be automated altogether.
Coding agents have reached the point of reliability and quality where it is now possible to cause a great many moderately complex software engineering projects to occur.
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It will take time to realize this potential, if for no other reason than the fact that for most people, the tool I am describing and the mentality required to wield it well are entirely alien. You have to learn to think a little bit like a software engineer; you have to know “the kinds of things software can do.” You have to learn also to think like the chief executive of a thousand small (but fast growing) teams of software engineers who possess expert-level knowledge of virtually all domains of human intellectual life. Grasping all of this, and learning how to embody it, requires humans to adopt a strange and new kind of agenticness. Not all of us will. But some people understand it already, and their numbers will only grow. Young people in particular, blessed with neuroplasticity, will have internalized this to a depth few grownups will be able to comprehend. This transformation will therefore be sociological as well as technological, the revolution cultural as well as industrial.