I just spent a few days at a retreat on the future of software development. Small rooms. Unconference format. Some of the sharpest people in our industry - the kind of names that show up on the spines of the books on your shelf. I’m not going to tell you who was there or who said what. We ran the whole thing under Chatham House Rule: use what you learn, attribute none of it. This is my initial take-away.
Here’s a question I can’t stop chewing on: why is some software so damn good, and most of it so… not? Not buggy. Not slow. Just bad. Bad in a way you feel in your gut the moment you touch it. The answer isn’t tooling, or budget, or headcount. It’s taste. And I’m starting to think taste is the whole ballgame in the age of AI.
There’s a thing going around the engineering blogs and Hacker News right now: AI killed Agile, Waterfall is back, write your specs up front, welcome to “Waterfall 2.0.” You may have seen the Medium piece titled Agile Is Dead. AI Killed It. Welcome Back, Waterfall.. Hmmm.
And once I followed the logic far enough, I ran into a second question that nobody seems to want to answer out loud: if the agent writes the code, who actually reads it?