Citizens Build, Agents Execute, Experts Govern

TL;DRWhy building an app over the weekend isn't the same as building enterprise software I’ve noticed an interesting gap opening up over the last six months. It isn’t really a gap in technology. It’s a gap in what different people think software engineering actually is. The conversation usually starts the same way. A non-techie, maybe an executive, tells me about something they’ve built over the weekend. Sometimes it’s a chatbot. Sometimes it’s an internal workflow. Sometimes it’s a surprisingly polished application that solves a real business problem. They’re excited, and they should be. Twelve months ago they probably couldn’t have built it at all. Then comes the question. “If AI can do this now, why aren’t our engineering teams delivering ten times faster?” It’s a perfectly reasonable question, after all we’ve all seen the demos. The first thing that would come to my head is “you don’t know what it takes to build enterprise grade software”. But then I think about what I mean and how to explain it to a non-technical person without sounding super patronising. And then it hit me, we did this to ourselves. We’ve spent so many years banging on about how to write good software that e…

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