Agents

I ended this essay with a pattern rather than a prediction. Someone raises the level of abstraction so that more people can build more things with less ceremony. The people who mastered the older, lower level object that the new level hides too much and understands too little. The new level turns out to be useful anyway, its rough edges get sanded down over a few years, and it becomes the unremarkable ground that the next generation stands on. Then someone proposes to raise the floor again. I am watching the floor rise now, in my own career, and this time the pattern has a wrinkle I did not fully sit with before. Every earlier layer still expected a programmer to write the layer above it. FORTRAN expected formulas. C expected C. The compiler translated what a person had already composed. The layer arriving now inverts that. The artifact a person hands down is a description in something close to English, and the thing standing on that description and turning it into running behavior is not a junior engineer but a machine that read a great deal of code and can write more. ...

For the past week or so I have been doing a peculiar kind of engineering. I have been extending an AI assistant, and I have been doing it with the assistant. Not by feeding it into an editor as a source file, but by sitting across from it, describing what it was missing, and letting it write the code that would connect the new capability back into itself. The distinction sounds like a technicality. It is not. It is most of the point, but first, the two things I set out to give it. ...