Software is having its CAD moment, and right now it feels like drowning

Short summary

AI coding agents have made writing code cheap but reviewing it the new bottleneck—humans must either babysit every step or drown in unread output. The author compares this to CAD's transformation of engineering: a shift up in abstraction level that's painful mid-transition because the tooling bridge doesn't exist yet. The likely path forward isn't upfront specification but capturing the shape of work done once, so agents only pull humans in at genuine decision points.

• •AI agents make code generation cheap but code review the new scarce bottleneck
• •Industry is optimizing agent throughput, which worsens the review bottleneck
• •Solution may be capturing workflow shape from messy first runs, then automating repetition with human checkpoints

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.