Software engineering has had two crises before. They had the same shape: something became cheap, and the work moved to whatever was still hard. We are in the middle of a third.

The agent is what it is. The system around it, the harness, is the durable engineering object. A small model, three disciplines, and a slogan: fix the harness, not the output.

Introducing this blog — why I’m writing about software engineering in the agent era.