Ahmet Erdem Dumlu @aerdemdumlu - Twitter Profile

27 days ago

Chinese researchers published a paper with a devastating title: "The End of Software Engineering” it argues software engineering is finished. In traditional software, code is the carrier of pre-written human logic. In agentic software, the AI agent is the software. Code is no longer a permanent monument built by human hands. It is completely ephemeral, dynamically generated, executed, and discarded on the fly by an LLM-driven reasoning loop. Think about how software delivery has evolved: • Era 1: On-premise licensed software (you installed it locally) • Era 2: SaaS (hosted in the cloud, managed by vendors) • Era 3: Agent-as-a-Service (AaaS) Each historical shift transferred complexity away from the user. But this latest shift transfers something entirely different. It transfers decision-making complexity itself. The paper argues that traditional engineering is hitting a hard complexity wall. Human brains can only hold so much state, manage so many dependencies, and debug so many lines at once. LLM-based agents scale non-linearly. They don't just write functions faster. They navigate architectural complexity by outsourcing reasoning to models that improve every single month. Which means the role of the developer is permanently changing. You are no longer a code author typing syntax line by line. You are an intent architect. Your job is no longer writing the implementation. It is specifying goals, designing multi-agent coordination loops, and auditing outcomes.