First of all the name has changed. According to President Donald Trump AI is now SI. So Artificial Intelligence is now Super Intelligence.
We also have the Speed of change :
People in tech are more than used to change ; seeing the internet go from zero to everywhere, the arrival of mobile communications and smartphones exploding in popularity, cloud computing rising from a niche concern, and the development of programming languages like Go and Rust, and frameworks like React (web) and Jetpack Compose (Android).
Despite this, the scale and pace of the impact AI or SI is having at present is still without precedent. That’s how industry veteran Martin Fowler described it at The Pragmatic Summit :
“Nothing has hit with the magnitude of AI. This is a whole size difference from anything that we’ve faced before.
On a smaller scale, we were very much involved in the growth of object-oriented languages. [object-oriented languages] scared a lot of people, but it didn’t scare us so much because we were part of it.
The internet had a huge impact upon us all. And, of course, we were spreading the challenge of agile software development. [Agile] had a very big impact on a lot of organizations because you could tell by how hard they resisted it.
But [for all those other changes] we kept talking about how important they were and how valuable they were and trying to persuade people of the importance of them. It may sound surprising, but even for the internet, there were people who wouldn’t think that was important !
For AI there’s no argument about how important it is. You cannot put blinkers on to deny the importance of this thing.”
What changed concretely ?
#1 Nobody writes code by hand anymore
As the calendar enters Q4 of this year, we see this has solidified into a mega trend since the end of 2025 year when models greatly improved at coding. Related to this, in the very first article of this year we asked the question : when AI writes almost all code, what happens to software engineering ?
Today, there are plenty of signs that most engineers have stopped writing code by hand, and it was also a sign of the times recently when the Ruby on Rails creator sparked a “death of coding by hand” debate. Personally, I’m excited by the new opportunity that AI creates, and it’s exciting to experience this revolution firsthand. As mentioned in that deepdive, I’m certain that my way of coding will change drastically in 2026, and there’ll be plenty of knock-on effects.
#2 Working with several parallel agents is increasingly common
The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter for example like talking to engineers at AI labs because their working practices are often a few months ahead of the rest of the industry. Claude Code creator, Boris Cherny, revealed the new way he gets things done on the podcast :
“I have 5 terminal tabs. Each one of them has a checkout of their repository. I’ll round robin and start Claude Code in each one. I also run 5-10 Claudes on Claude Web, in parallel with my local Claudes.”
A few months after these comments, on last week’s pod between the Pragmatic Engineer newsletter and Cockroach Labs cofounder, Peter Mattis, – who’s an extremely productive developer who wrote circa 100K lines of code/year, pre-AI – said he’s doing something similar :
“Oftentimes, I’m doing things in parallel. I find my cognitive overhead is about 5-10 agent sessions concurrently. But sometimes those sessions will have many subagents doing things.”
To conclude, The reality is that SI or AI coding agents are already everywhere, and agentic systems look set to proliferate very soon. This will bring great demand for software engineers who are willing and able to build next-generation systems, and it’ll be a baseline criterion to be excited about the problem space.
