Technology Rewired: Software Development

How has the software development team changed across five eras?

1. Era 1 · On-prem

   Before 2005

   0.2

   Engineering teams wrote code in desktop IDEs, kept it in on-prem version control, and shipped on release trains measured in months. A separate QA group tested by hand, and a build engineer owned the one machine that could produce a release.

2. Era 2 · SaaS and cloud

   2005 to 2020

   0.5

   Hosted git, pull requests, and CI made the commit the unit of work. Teams got smaller and shipped weekly or daily, with code review as the main quality gate. Open source packages replaced a lot of in-house code, and the new roles were DevOps and developer experience.

3. Era 3 · AI-assisted

   2020 to 2024

   1.5

   Autocomplete assistants suggested lines and whole functions inside the editor. Engineers still drove every change: the assistant typed faster, but a person decided what to build, read every line, and owned the merge.

4. Era 4 · Agentic

   2024 onward

   3.0

   Coding agents now work at the task level. They read a repo, edit many files, run the test suite, and open a pull request for review, and terminal agents can run for long stretches with little steering. I wrote about this turn in Claude Code and the future of programming. Senior engineers spend more of their day reviewing and specifying than typing.

   The constraint moved to review capacity and trust. My notes on what actually works in 2026 come down to small tasks, good tests, and a human who reads the diff.

5. Era 5 · Next 5 years

   2026 to 2031

   4.0

   My bet: most routine code (tests, migrations, integrations, fixes for known bugs) is written by agents, and teams are organized around product owners, reviewers, and platform engineers who keep the agents productive and safe. Junior roles change most; the path in becomes reviewing and debugging agent output rather than writing boilerplate.

Which software development software is being rewired?

• Coding Assistants and IDEs

  Coding tools moved from editors that completed a method name to agents that take an issue and return a pull request. Visual Studio and Eclipse helped engineers type; GitHub Copilot suggested lines; Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and Devin now plan, edit, run tests and open PRs. The engineer's job shifts from writing code to specifying and reviewing it.

Coming next

• Testing and QAwave 3
• Code review
• Version control
• API platforms
• Low-code and no-code
• App builders
• Documentation generators
• Feature flags
• Design-to-code

Also wired into this category: Incident Management and On-Call.