In Support of Agent Led Software Engineering

Hey, Sumit on this side. I'm gonna talk about something that's a bit controversial. It's been going on - I'm sure all of you watching this video are well aware of this. I'm gonna bring up this topic of coding with AI - where it is, where I feel it is personally. And I'm gonna come from a very different side. I'm actually gonna come from a very different side of this entire planet. Geographically, I am living in a small village. I live somewhere in a small Himalayan village in the state of West Bengal. This is just outside the small town of Kalimpong.

So for context, I have been in software engineering for almost 18 years. I was straight out of college, or actually in college, when I was working with a few open source projects. No major contributions back then, but just like anybody in their late teens or early twenties, I was wide-eyed. I was inspired by everything that was happening across the world. I remember hanging out in the chat rooms of MIT, Stanford, because the web was more open back then. And I do fondly remember, I think Tim BL, Tim Berners-Lee came up and asked me in one of the chat rooms, "Who are you?" And I was like, "Holy cow! Is this really Tim B. Lee asking me?"

So yeah, I've been with tech for that long. This was, 2000, maybe before 2000. And I bought my first domain when it was, I think, 1998. I wanted to build a web business since around that time. I've tried and failed countless number of times. I've been a software engineer, started off, of course, in college. It was C, C++ and all of those things. Before that, I have a background since school in computers. I was privileged. There's no doubt about it. I was privileged, even though I don't come from a financially sound family, but I was privileged that I had a great school.

And I was, I would say, an above-average student. So yeah, I got all of those things, and one thing led to the other. I was in Google Summer of Code in 2006. I used to get projects. I used to earn like a hundred dollars an hour straight out of college in India. I never really left my hometown for most of my life, and this is ridiculous for most people who are either watching this today or have known me, that I built teams in the U.S. and Canada like three, four times. I've led teams, and I have never stepped into the U.S. I've lived in Germany for a while. I built teams there as well. I've led teams there as well. And of course, for the rest of my life, I've been here in India.

And for the last, I would say, six-ish years, I've been in the mountains. And this is why, what I'm talking about, this is where it relates to, is because I've become kind of angry, kind of sad with capitalism, with the version of capitalism that we have. And I know with all of this agent coding and a lot of frustration coming out of people everywhere, engineers, I understand it is frustrating. But if you look at it from my perspective, it is liberating. Because I am one of those who slowly understood that this has just become a game.

Software to me, if you ask somebody like me who used to be aspirational, who was inspired by technology, the point was to me to uplift everybody. We did a little bit of it, but what we also did was close it in a box, put it behind a subscription, plug a few fiber optic cables to it, and said, here, you can have a limited version of this. So much software is not really meant for small and medium businesses. So much software does not help the lowest of our society. And to me, that was the goal. I don't know why I thought that was the goal, but to me, when I looked at the researchers from the universities back then, I looked at open source as a movement back then, I thought this was a good thing.

Because I was coming from, the perspective of finance and economy, I was coming from a very, very bad place. For me, this was a good thing because this was liberation. Finally, we were globally connected to a system which would empower everybody. I don't know why I had that wild imagination. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe let's assume that I was wrong.

But all of these people who pushed to bring a certain sense of liberation to software, all of them only saw big companies coming in, taking their work, package it in a box, plug a pipe to it, and say, here, you can have it now at a subscription. This annoyed me. This annoyed the hell out of me because we software engineers, we cherished those moments. We supported them by writing more software, building that infrastructure, making so many layers of abstraction which are not needed, which just made the whole system more complicated, just so that a few companies could centralize, could amass all of that power, and again give it out to subscription. Instead of taking software, taking hardware, which was already able to connect across the world and breaking those barriers, making it easy for people to run what they want to run where they want to run it, we centralized everything and we cheered it. We engineers cheered it.

And how many of us really write any of the core software that we are complaining today? Most of us don't. Most of us actually write two layers of React and we call it a day and we get fact checks. I feel because the last few years I've suffered a lot through my own mental health issues because I chased a dream that didn't make sense to me. I got very disconnected. It started when I was living in Germany, this was way back in 2014 and 15, and I took steps back. I started traveling a lot. I just could not do it anymore, where I felt like everything that I do, everything that I do.

Has to be owned by a bigger corporation, and that's it. There is no other purpose to it. It is not something that I can do. That is to be used by small, medium businesses, mom and pop shops across the world. That was simply not happening. And again, I don't know. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe I am the one who held on to a dream as a child, which never came to being. But at this moment, after my own years of struggle with this modern version of capitalism, where we have literally boxed everything that software could have become into this centralized system, I finally feel we are liberated. Because coding was never - I mean, coding was an issue. There is no doubt. I am not saying that coding is not hard. Coding is hard. But planning, organizing, getting shit together when you're writing large software is harder. And when coding, the amount of hours needed to put in to build anything has come down: What has happened is it has liberated a lot of us like myself.

And that's what I am seeing across the world. Again, where am I? I am nowhere near a tech hub. I am nowhere near. I don't know. I am not even in Bangalore. I have not seen Bangalore for I don't know how many years. And I don't care about it really. What I care about is today because of AI, the costs have plummeted. The models have plateaued, and I can reap the benefits of something that I finally feel is truly democratized. When it comes to pricing, it's truly commercialized (I meant: commoditized). That there are so many competitors all trying to give me tokens at the cheapest cost possible, and they're trying to improve the tokens' performance at the same time. So for the first time in my life, I am on the receiving end, sitting in this tiny village somewhere in the Himalayas, and being able to produce software. I believe, I truly believe that I can bring software back to people who really need it the most. Not the content creators, not the influencers, not the big corporations, but the small businesses. Because we have taken everything in the name of development, we centralized everything.

No commerce happens. Like barely any commerce happens outside of those big boxes. How is that fair? How is that fair? How did we as engineers make that fair? With our fat salaries, that's it. I've not been able to... Like, just the sheer brutality of, you know, like we call it development. We engineers have called it development. Think of stock trades, for example. We think the stock market, like, isn't it that the stock market was meant for the market? The market is us, bloody human beings. Where is the market now? Most trades are done by bots, and we are happy to push the software and the hardware end of this and say, "This is development." That's not development. Development is not killing us, removing us from the picture.

So when AI lands that same power to people across the world, I say that's good revenge. That's good revenge because we created finally a system where people who really care about those who don't have this can actually spend their hours. Because I have hours to give. I run a farm. I live somewhere far away from all the fucking nonsense, and I have hours to give. I have been here for six years. I'll be here for the next forty, if I'm alive. And I have every day hours to give, to contribute back to a system, to software which I believed as a young person I believed would empower us, and it stopped doing that. It stopped doing that, so it's high time that it comes back.

And that's where I believe that this is powerful, that this is liberating because it is no longer in the hands (of big companies). Like, even the big companies are struggling. They're struggling to figure out what to do with software. That's a good thing. That's a good thing for me because that means that if they crash, smaller players will take their position because there is no void. There will be no void. Somebody will come in. And I believe that more and more smaller players, indie developers, indie projects, projects for the last mile, projects which are highly customizable will take the space of large SaaS. Large SaaS, which has just eroded what I believe software could have been. I think this is a good thing.

I think that more people, the ones we don't know about, the ones who are not influencers, the ones who are not taking all the YouTube space, they are writing software now, mostly generating it. I believe they are customizing the last mile. I believe the entire stack will be rewritten. I believe full stack will mean something else. I believe that our frameworks will come built in with AI agents. I believe software will evolve to cater for smaller personal needs than it has ever been. And I don't (just) believe it - because I build those harnesses. I build the harnesses I need, so I know they can be built.

So this is my take on software, and I know that a lot of jobs are at stake. I know a lot of people are in confusion, but so it has always been. It has always been that somebody, because of some company taking some decisions, some other people have been simply washed out of the system. It has never been fair. So now it will not be fair either.

Go to OpenRouter, and you will see hundreds of providers now. There are again, me as a consumer, I'm happy. I'm really happy that for the first time I'm getting something that I can plug in and plug out, and I can get the best price, best performance for the price, and I can simply switch providers. That's the best cloud, if there is any cloud, which is not a duopoly or a monopoly. That's the best cloud era to be in.

That's how I feel about what is the future of software, and I believe this is a great time to be an engineer. Just a different kind of an engineer. Thanks.