Comment by cadamsdotcom

People used to be programmers, but the ratio of typing to problem solving eventually caught up. Now programming is just part of the job.

Software engineering is falling to this trend too (somewhat)

The solution is to stop merely thinking of yourself as a software engineer and move up to the level of “manager of agents”.. but actually, managers deal with human stuff and this is fascinatingly mechanical - in fact even the unpredictability of these new tools is quite predictable. And so, a more useful framing is “software development process engineer”.

You can look at all the literature on building factories and production lines for ideas on what you’ll be doing.

You shouldn’t ever just have your agent write the software then review and ship it. You are missing massive opportunities to take yourself out of more loops over time. What self-reflection are you and the model doing to catch opportunities to improve? What is your method for codifying your acceptance criteria, so your agents can do the work to higher quality over time without you in the loop to get it there? What’s your process for continuous improvement? How do your models know what work other team members’ models are doing simultaneously so there’s less stepping on toes? Can THAT be automated so you don’t need to sit in Slack and trade “human-verbal locks” on areas of the architecture?

There’s immense room for creativity in the role of a software development process engineer.