rough draft: This is the start of a series of posts that I’m writing to force some organization of my thoughts around LLM-assisted and agentic software development._

I have been playing around with LLM and agent-assisted development since ChatGPT 3 emerged to great fanfare. I was not unique in the immediate recognization that these tools would have a dramatic effect on software engineering.

While working in the software industry, I had not been paying attention to AI developments, and to say I was surprised was an understatement. I shared with many others the sense of existential dread at the likely disruption of the industry of my livelihood, and what could not help but feel like a direct attack on my identity as someone who ‘programmed’.

Despite my personal angst about the risks, I’ve remained bullish on its abilities.

It seems that the confluence of model improvements, maturation in coordination harnesses and best practices, along with a growing general awareness and skill in using it has caused a collective tipping point of recognition to be crossed in recent months. The impact is huge and ongoing. Software is such a key part of American economic growth that this collective recognition has even had huge impacts in the markets CNN

It is clear that there is an emerging consensus that reflects a reality backed by survey data (trailing data - unsure of date: 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey),hat AI assisted development will be used in the vast majority of software development.

While verification of the numbers and real-world impact of this tooling trails the hype, there is also an emerging consensus that this new model backed ecosystem of software development will vastly increase the productivity and accelerate the development of software.

There are still doubts, but it does seem that this tooling may provide an entirely new level of abstraction over software development.

I agree with this assessment. I also think that in large part the reason there is so much excitement and apparent productivity to be gained is itself an indicator of the enormous gap between the capabilities of the pre-AI software engineering ecosystem and the intentions of users.