If you look at those operating at the bleeding edge, it doesn't look anything like yesteryear. It's a real step change. Fully autonomous agentic software engineering is becoming a reality. While still in its infancy, some results are starting to be made public, and it's mind boggling. We're transitioning to a full agent-only workflow in my team at work. The engineering task has shifted from writing code to harness engineering, and essentially building a system that can safely build itself to a high quality given business requirements.
Up until recently I kinda feel like the scepticism was warranted, but after building my own harness that can autonomously produce decent quality software (at least for toy problem scale, granted), and getting hands on with autoresearch via writing a set of skills for it https://github.com/james-s-tayler/lazy-developer, I feel fundamentally different about software engineering than I did until relatively recently.
If you look at the step change from Sonnet 4.5 to Opus 4.5 and what that unlocked, and consider the rumoured Mythos model is apparently not just an incremental improvement, but another step change. Then pair it with infrastructure for operating agents at scale like https://github.com/paperclipai/paperclip and SOTA harnesses like the ones being written about on the blogs of the frontier labs... I mean... you tell me what you think is coming down the pipe?
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