There's still plenty of innovation in the software space. Look at Roc-lang, for example. Fairly ideal as a human-agent collaborative language.

Software Engineering is not dead, damn it. Anything research and original is not dead. Are these things fantastic at connecting concepts, producing digital work products, and putting out derivate hypotheses? Sure. But proper original thought is still firmly in the realm of humans. Though speed of propagation of new ideas probably did change massively.

I largely buy this thesis.

I think the space where juniors can thrive in this New Normal is to fill in the gaps in written form. Seniors don't know what we know. I'm constantly finding implicit knowledge I assume a junior possesses that they in fact, do not have an inkling that it even exists. Lo and behold, the loops and harnesses don't, either. That's why they come to me asking the questions they ask in the first place.

Holding that brief junior perspective, filling in those innumerable gaps while learning everything else being thrown at them via the agents, is critical at this juncture for the agents to be able to bootstrap themselves from ever-broader, ever-vaguer initial instructions. When those potholes are mostly filled, I can think of a lot of other stuff for juniors to work upon, but I am sorely missing this piece with agents at this stage of their evolution, and I definitionally am unable to fill it myself. It is the source of most of my rework of their code output.

The line between Computer Science and Software Engineering is pretty blurry and the term "Software Engineering" has been controversial from the get go. Bolting together established enterprise patterns may be dead but creative problem solving with automation and the science of computers surely is not.

Software development evolves. Every decade. Or faster. Always has, and always will.

It’s not dead, but it’s starting to feel nostalgic. There will always be a few (of us) who still read the code, like the old school “operator” from The Matrix. And maybe the software geeks that still read code will be better for it, but that will eventually be just at the boundaries.