A manic new phase of the AI boom is sweeping through Silicon Valley, powered by autonomous “agents” capable of liquefying weeks of manual labor into minutes. For now, the frenzy is largely confined to software engineering. But inside that bubble, the shift feels seismic — deepening the gulf between AI builders and bystanders. “I’ve followed tech for 25 years and I’ve never felt a larger gap between the ~1 million people using Codex/Claude and the rest of humanity,” tweeted James Wang, director of product marketing at Cerebras. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently described the current state of software engineering as the “centaur phase” — a reference to the half-human, half-horse creature of Greek mythology. Just as a chess player aided by a computer could once beat any standalone machine, an engineer paired with an AI agent may now be the most powerful unit in tech.

Full report : How agentic AI could overturn the future of software engineering in not so distant future.