AI Agents May Make Code a Byproduct, Not the End Goal of Software Engineering

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A research paper by Zhenfeng Cao titled 'Agentic Software: How AI Agents Are Restructuring the Software Paradigm' argues that AI agents could fundamentally redefine what software means. For roughly five decades, software engineering followed a model where humans wrote code containing logic for machines to execute, but agentic software shifts this to humans defining intent while agents reason, generate code, and evaluate outcomes. In this emerging model, code becomes a temporary tool rather than the final deliverable, representing an evolution from licensed software to SaaS to a new 'Agent-as-a-Service' model. The core engineering challenge is expected to shift from writing instructions to designing systems that can reason, act, recover from failure, and remain trustworthy. As a result, skills like system architecture, observability, security, and human oversight may grow in importance even as the volume of human-written code declines.

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