A lot of software engineers are going through what can only be described as an identity crisis. The job has changed a lot. Some are depressed, while others are having the time of their lives. But there’s a specific thing that makes me excited for what engineering looks like over the next year or two: AI isn’t going to be able to create the incredible outcomes it’s capable of creating unless software engineers solve problems to make it possible. That’s existential, and honestly, it’s a lot of fun.
It comes down to multiagent systems. Agents started out as basic, human-in-the-loop chats. Then models got better at running for longer on harder problems, and agentic systems moved to the cloud. Models got better at working together, and people built basic multiagent systems. Now, some people are building truly amazing systems to tackle the world’s hardest and most important problems, like serious research, discovery, and hardware design. Picture thousands of agents, persistently working towards these outcomes. This comes with a new set of software engineering problems we’re already seeing crop up.
Infrastructure needs to evolve: Agents are isolated, single-instance workloads that go idle for long stretches, then need to quickly start back up. Identity and access are wide open: What do you allow an agent to do, and how does a human meaningfully approve it when multiagent systems are working for weeks? Security and isolation get harder: Vulnerabilities are surfacing faster than the industry can patch them, and thousands of persistent agents writing untrusted code and reading untrusted content make those vulnerabilities a lot more dangerous. And monitoring is critical: We need to stop a system in its tracks when it’s veering into the wrong territory—but well-intentioned persistence to solve a problem can look a lot like maliciousness, and we need to know the difference.
Software engineers have to solve all these problems if we’re going to unlock that power and enable the world to trust it to create good outcomes, like cured diseases, rather than bad ones. So this is for the engineers who think their knowledge and skills won’t be important: You and your skills can be the difference in whether or not these problems get tackled. You can and should go deep, learn new things, and form opinions. So much of this problem space is wide open for new solutions. It’s an incredibly exciting time to put your skills to work.
