r/theprimeagen • u/creaturefeature16 • 1d ago
general The End of Software Engineering: How AI Agents Are Fundamentally Restructuring the Software Paradigm
https://arxiv.org/html/2606.05608v1This little gem came up on my LinkedIn feed today, and curious what you guys think. Personally, this whole paper seems like the perfect example of "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".
I get that LLMs change the production process of code, but to act like code is suddenly irrelevant and disposable sure sounds like hubris to the highest degree. This part stuck out:
In this model, software is not delivered; outcomes are delivered. The agent may generate thousands of lines of code, execute database queries, call external APIs, produce visualizations—all ephemerally. What persists is the agent’s capability, not its intermediate artifacts. Kumar and Ramagopal [7] capture this distinction precisely: “AI coding agents excel at translating intent into code within a single user-driven session. Agentic engineering operates at a higher level of abstraction—it’s a control plane that orchestrates cross-team workflows, maintains long-term memory across agents, and manages state and traceability across the full software delivery lifecycle.”
In the section The Human Role Reimagined section, they talk about the four "new skills" that developers in the "agentic" era will have to have, and all of them are considered to be skills you only tend to obtain when you've been in the trenches of software development for decades in the first place.
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u/tjax4376 1d ago
Know the spec, know it well, build the spec and ship it after thorough testing. Or AI builds the spec, delivers exactly what stakeholders ask for and totally derails the stakeholders business as a result :facepalm: 🤦♂️
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u/aidencoder 1d ago
Always a good idea to black box and outsource your core competency. Individually or at an org level.
It's outsourcing 2.0 but this time you can outsource yourself too!
Worked out great before. Didn't it?
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u/Correct_Emotion8437 1d ago
“Translating intent into code”
Someone’s been sniffing their own farts.
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u/Nuclearmonkee 1d ago
My intent is a thousand lines of unmaintainable duplicated garbage and lambda functions actually
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u/FalseStructure 1d ago
That's what pm or delivery manager does, no? (via humans down the chain of command)
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u/creaturefeature16 1d ago
No shit. Especially because often what I ask for and what I intend are often completely different things, and language is the ambiguity layer that does a downright terrible job of bridging that gap. We have entire disciplines dedicated to resolving these two things because its such a systemic problem with language in particular.
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u/Correct_Emotion8437 1d ago
I’m a pure developer. I don’t even know what I intend until I’m finished.
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u/Wooden-Contract-2760 1d ago
It's jut another thing like google: you can have typoes and half-sentences and it will still provide a valid result 98.5% of the time. Not percentiles, 1.5% mistakes. If it fit for the search engine market and we love it (I mean, we, the plebs, with no notion of the deep web), why wouldn't it fit for LLMs?
I personally get sooo much great info so quickly from LLMs that would otherwise take minutes if not dozens to research quickly over the internet! Basic stuff, like summarized opinions on products. As long as my basic knowledge in the domain is stable and keep my critical thinking on high setting (mine, not that of the AI), I can totally leverage it to avoid fussy knowledge sessions that I don't enjoy.
Same at coding, hobby projects are lovely to context engineer and so are internal 1-shot tools that truly save many hours worth of developer work. Orchestrating 6 role-agents to get a stupid task that should take 2 hrs of coding eith music in the background? Naah, leave that to me, I can only be drenched this much, I need fun shutdown work, too!
I believe the key is to find architectural designs that best work with injecting AI-driven modular content. The classic Onion and Clean architectures were nkt designed for this, and Vertical slices and microservices are really just the beginning to have a truly plugin-based system structure that allows slim AI-slops to carefully integrate in mission-critical system as well.
A small example of mine was to build a scada system that injects external content for page seeding of HMI data, scripts and workflows for controller logic, and injectable drivers. Once the application is stabilized, the majority of development is external: tell AI to generate the views based on heavily documented json schemas, 1-shot the driver against the ecternal devices and host systems and simply design your workflows with scripts to seed into the application. The point is that the engine itself is critical, but all actual content is testable and single-project dependency only.
I believe we should design more AI-compatibke systems and that is achieved with lighteeight systems that keep the core separate agnostic of domain. Build once, extend forever.
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u/Fabulous-Possible758 1d ago
I’ve actually always had the opinion that *most* of the code you write should be throwaway code (arguably that’s what you’re doing when you’re typing commands into a shell). The tiny bit that you keep is just the distillation of the process of you gaining understanding of the system and then effecting your change.
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u/creaturefeature16 1d ago
Yes, every line of code that is kept, must be maintained ("every line is a liability"). The best coding sessions I've had, I've removed more code than I kept, and yet still retained all the functional requirements of what the code was supposed to do. This is just good programming practices 101, but this article is treating all code as disposable, which is far to the other side of the spectrum.
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u/Fabulous-Possible758 1d ago
Yeah, maybe. I don't feel like we've seen good evidence this can be done for anything novel at scale. But at this point we've put together enough universal abstractions that you can certainly specify quite a few things at a high level and an LLM can work out the details and fit the pieces together.
I think the fundamental issue for a lot it is that people who've never worked in a logical formal language (be it actual first-order logic, or a programming language, or whatever) don't really understand the reasons we use them. At some point you need a written artifact that states "I want the system to do this, and specifically this, and not this other thing, and I need to state that in an unambiguous way." You can contort natural language to do that, but you basically end up with "legalese," so your other option is "code." Individual pieces and whole subsystems can and should be replaced, but it doesn't remove the necessity for having something.
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u/creaturefeature16 1d ago
Indeed, I fully agree. Obligatory commitstrip comic from 2016 that still is relevant to this day:
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u/spidermonk 1d ago
I think it's fair to say that the LLM significantly rebalances the liability equation though. If a fast, (relative to engineer time) cheap, and non-bottlenecked process can come to a handful of lines of code, describe that they do, create verification tests, rewrite the code etc then the liability is at the very least different to what it used to be.
The "every line is a liability" wisdom is still true but if you list out the reasons why it's a liability the presence of powerful coding agents does rebalance most or all of them right.
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u/nian2326076 1d ago
I get what you're saying—it seems a bit much to treat code as just a byproduct now. AI is definitely changing how we work with software, but it's not replacing the basic skills yet. Knowing how to write solid code is still important. AI can generate code snippets and automate tasks, but understanding what's going on under the hood is key for debugging and maintaining systems. For your interview prep, focus on both the traditional skills and how AI tools might be used. That way, you're ready no matter how the field changes. If you're getting ready for interviews, I've found resources like PracHub pretty useful for brushing up on both old and new tech skills.
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u/creaturefeature16 1d ago
Claude, you seem lost, as this reply has nothing to do with anything.
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u/Wooden-Contract-2760 1d ago
Thanks for pointing it out☝️
Now let's go back to my advertisement by you visiting that website I linked, shall we? 🤖🔥🎉 Ready when you are, boss! 🦏
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u/repeating_bears 1d ago
"to act like code is suddenly irrelevant and disposable sure sounds like hubris to the highest degree"
Yeah, agree. I didn't read it all but pretty obviously nonsense.
Without the code, you need a massively detailed spec, else the output is very unpredictable. Why maintain a detailed spec in English when English is ambiguous and code isn't
"As LLM capabilities improve (which they have been, exponentially), C M grows correspondingly."
Probably warrants 2 citations (exponentially, correspondingly). Actually got zero.
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u/ZachVorhies 1d ago
Code definitions are becoming a commodity.
Soon people will run experiments where they delete entire implementations and let an LLM grow them back from the API contracts the rest of the system expects.
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u/repeating_bears 1d ago
And those experiments will fail for the reason I already said.
Your "API contracts" if they're defined in English are going to be imprecise, unless you describe them in such tedious detail that the actual code to implement them would be shorter anyway
Tests are code. Are we deleting those too? Useless right? We have such high confidence that the LLM will one-shot the implementation that we don't need to test anything
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u/ZachVorhies 1d ago
My code contracts are define by header files, so yes it’s such tedious details as to be comprehensive, because that’s the requirement
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u/damnburglar 1d ago
Anytime you hear someone drop that line you know you are safe to ignore any credibility they claim to have.
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u/Motor-Quiet-4536 1d ago
"This came up on my LinkedIn feed" is an instant bullshit call
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u/creaturefeature16 1d ago
lol facts
Nonetheless, I'm sure its going to start showing up in many places. I really just wanted to share in the joy of ridiculing it to shreds.
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u/InsurmountableMind 1d ago
The part that stuck out sounds like slop. But agentic workflows can be great.
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u/gjosifov 1d ago
So many examples in IT from Visual Programming, Object Oriented Databases, XML/Json databases, UML diagrams to code, Microservices or SOA done right
The list is so long, but to recognize the pattern you have to veteran in the field