In our highly segmented and fragmented world, it’s easy to feel a master of your craft.

He’s a specialist in his field (always a “he”). But there’s a new kid in town. Faster. Cooler.

He feels threatened.

He says, look at this crap the new kid made. It’s not up to standard x, y, z. We can’t trust it.

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There’s already pushback against coding agents. Obviously, it’s mostly by coders.

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There’s something real behind the hesitation of the master to approve the work of a brilliant student.

The work is beyond what the master can comprehend. To the master, it FEELS brilliant.

What if it isn’t brilliant after all?

Or worse. What if it will destroy our data, or share it with our enemies?

Agentic AI for coding can work ten, twenty times faster than a human developer. So much faster, how can the master ever keep up?

And if the master is unable to keep up with the brilliant student, who will then sign off on their work?

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Software is woven into the social fabric. You don’t need to scrutinise every thread.

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At our company, we struggle with the same problem. That coding is so much faster is just one facet.

A developer now works on multiple tickets simultaneously. Sometimes on tickets related to multiple projects. They orchestrate agents. They’ve become a manager.

And like a manager, they know only to a degree.

In so many industries, the concept of raw material is moving upward. In software, code is now raw material.

The clothing industry uses thread, it doesn’t have cotton pickers. It has its ways to automate quality control.

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The digital revolution isn’t even half done yet.

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Software developers leave the handiwork to become managers. And like managers, they’re a step up from spinning the thread. No longer stretching it to ascertain its strength. Eyeing it to judge its colour and gloss.

Managers must understand the goal. The goal is not to produce quality thread. The thread is important, of course. But the goal is to provide warm clothes for the winter.

Everything is software and software is like water.

Quality control is no longer all about writing lines of code, then creating a PR, having your colleagues discuss each line at length, disagreeing and trying a new approach, and the lead dev then saying: “this is an anti-pattern, start again”.

Those days have gone. To keep up with the brilliant student, in the software industry, we’re discovering new ways of doing quality control.

It’s not about code. That’s important, of course. But we’ve discovered a way to automate code production.

And yes, there’s pushback. “I don’t trust what I can’t see with my own two eyes”.

There’s always pushback. From “experts”. But it’s about the goal, not the code. About building tools that help. Weaving software into the social fabric.

Let’s get to work.