As of perhaps 20-30 years ago, one could say that for most people working in tech, hardware became abstracted away and only software was the working concern.
Over the past few years, many in the tech industry have been unsure how to understand where AI fits into their life and work. Take, for example, the stunning rise of AI-enabled code generation.
In this post, I'd like to consider this mental model: what if we consider AI, in particular agentic AI, as another layer on top of software? And much the same way that software became a layer of abstraction over hardware, could we say that agentic AI is now a layer of abstraction over sofware?
The parallels grow more apparent to me the more I think about it. For example, a future where only a small subset of tech workers interact directly with software doesn't seem far off, just like how we could say the same for those who interact directly with hardware.
The conclusion, then, is that working on the level of agents could become the dominant paradigm for the next evolution of the tech industry. 'Software engineer' might become 'agent engineer'.