Software's Groundhog Day on Notes from the Rabbit Hole

If AI Does More of the Coding, What Should People Get Back?

Mon, 02 Nov 2026 00:43:18 -0500

Suppose the breakthrough actually happens.

Suppose that five years from now, in 2031, AI coding agents are no longer fickle assistants that hallucinate package names or drop security checks. Suppose they can reliably scaffold distributed architectures, generate rock-solid regression suites, migrate legacy databases, and deploy immutable infrastructure with verified formal proofs.

If the machines take on the overwhelming mechanical burden of writing code, what should happen to the humans who build software?

The AI Software Factory Is Being Built: Who Gets to Decide What It Makes?

Mon, 02 Nov 2026 00:43:18 -0500

Walk into almost any engineering team today, and the first thing you will notice is the quiet. The mechanical keyboard, that percussive symbol of the craft for half a century, has gone silent on a lot of desks. In its place, on many of them, is a small microphone held close to the mouth, and an engineer speaking softly into it.

The microphone has become the keyboard. That single change is the clearest sign of what a modern software factory looks like, because the work has turned conversational. Meetings between humans get captured as transcripts. Then the engineer sits down with an AI agent, and together they walk through the transcript, talking about what it means and how to implement it. Intent moves by voice now: meeting to transcript, transcript to conversation, conversation to specification, specification to code.

Why Software Keeps Getting Ordered to Act Like a Factory

Mon, 02 Nov 2026 00:43:18 -0500

For nearly sixty years, a seductive dream has haunted the executive suites of the technology industry. It usually starts when someone in leadership looks at a room full of eccentric, expensive software developers, looks at a manufacturing assembly line, and asks a deceptively simple question: Why can’t we just build software the way Ford builds cars?

It is an intoxicating fantasy. Henry Ford took the chaotic, artisan world of carriage-making and replaced it with a synchronized ribbon of steel where a Model T rolled off the line every ninety-three minutes. Why shouldn’t software work the same way? Imagine an intake hopper where business requirements drop in, move down an automated line of interchangeable workers, and emerge out the other side as shiny, defect-free, predictable software on a fixed schedule and a fixed budget.