Software Engineering Is Becoming Civil Engineering (christophermeiklejohn.com)

Semantic observability, not raw telemetry.

The endless accumulation of data doesn’t create value. Making meaning of that data is what people are craving. It all comes back to humans loving narratives.

It’s not a demotion. It’s a different kind of engineering. And honestly, it’s harder. Writing a feature is a bounded problem. Designing a platform that stays safe as dozens of people and agents ship changes to it every day, that’s an open-ended one. With AI agents doing more of the feature work, the assumption has to be that individual changes will sometimes be imperfect.

The job has always been about building resilience.

Agents hallucinate. They introduce subtle bugs. They make confident changes based on incomplete context. The platform has to absorb this. Not by making agents perfect, but by making the system tolerant of imperfection.

This has also always been true. More resilience against more volatile inputs.