AI agents can now rewrite an app in hours. But software value lies in judgment, trust, and specification — not code. Here's why the craft of software engineering is evolving, not dying.

marmelab

An experiment at Marmelab showed a coding agent (GitHub Copilot with Claude Sonnet) rebuilding 80% of an existing CRM in Angular in about 8 hours — demonstrating that reproducing existing software is now nearly free. However, agents still lack the judgment needed for original product design: when asked to spec a bug tracker from scratch, AI produced bland, generic results, while human-guided prototyping with Lovable yielded a far better outcome. The author argues that software value lies not in code but in judgment, trust, and specification. The proposed workflow: prototype fast with an agent, iterate until right, then capture the specification — treating code as a disposable artifact and specs as the true deliverable. Open-source precedent shows free code hasn't killed software businesses; trust and domain expertise remain what customers pay for.

Software Will Never Die

Agents Aren’t That Good At Software Engineering

<p>You can’t create deal, merge contracts, ui is ugly, codebase is nightmare but it’s free… If you ignore bill for agents</p>
<p>Also I wonder how this will scale but hey, naive junior level results are so great.</p>
