Raising the Floor Again: An Engineer's Obligations in the Age of 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. ...