If you build software, every day you see something that is broken or could be better. A year ago, that meant making a note (mentally or otherwise) to do something about it, whether right away for something urgent or sometime in the future.

Today, those moments spark a series of cascading thoughts…

If I have time to capture it, do I have time to have an agent try to replicate it? That would make this much more actionable. Writing it down is a prompt  really.

If I have time to have an agent replicate it, do I have time to kick off another agent to propose a fix? Then someone would have even more to work with.

If an agent is already proposing a fix, could another agent review the fix and improve the solution?

If we’ve made it this far, does this really need to handed off to someone else? Can I have an agent run through it all, capture screenshots for all browsers and devices, and verify the fix?

Maybe one more adversarial code review and then ship it?

After enjoying the win, you think, well, if I have time to do all of that, do I have time to kick off a handful of agents to find other things that are broken or could be better, and test and ship the fixes? Or should I go back to what I was doing when I found the bug in the first place?

We’re living through the big blur. Product, design, engineering, mobile, web, QA. Roles are fluid. Previously clear lines now fade at the edges like lines in an Agnes Martin painting.
 

The best were always part product manager, part designer, part engineer, part writer, part QA, part systems engineer. Those instincts informed our work and made us better at it. With agents, those instincts can be turned into progress.

It’s empowering and exhilarating. It’s also disorienting. As the Chemical Brothers’ song says, “Where do I start? Where do I begin?”

Will new lines be drawn or will they all just fade away? I don’t know, but my guess is that few lines will remain. We all turn ideas into software, informed by our taste and judgement. The part we each play is just expanding, making more possible than ever before.