The Conductor Developer

TL;DRWhy I think software development is starting to feel a little more like conducting an orchestra. There’s a shift happening in software development that I don’t think we’re talking about clearly enough. For the last couple of years we’ve framed AI as a productivity tool. How much faster can it write code? How many more features can we ship? How much cheaper can we build software? I think that’s the wrong question, but I understand why. The first thing AI became good at was writing code, so naturally that’s where we focused. As AI got better at coding, I expected the bottlenecks to move through the software delivery lifecycle: from coding to design and specification, architecture, then verification. And they have. We spent a lot of time at the most recent FOSE event discussing how we ensure good design, quality and resilience while agents increasingly write the code. That’s a topic for another ramble. A few months ago, though, I realised I was looking at the wrong bottleneck. I kept assuming it would simply move to the next phase of software delivery. I was wrong. AI didn’t change what great software looks like. It changed what’s scarce. Human attention is now the bottleneck. T…

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