Building in the Era of Autonomous Software Development

When you ride a Waymo in San Francisco, you see an empty driver’s seat and a steering wheel turning largely as a form of entertainment for the passengers. Sitting in the back seat, you can’t help but reflect on how dramatically cars will change over the next few decades as autonomous driving becomes pervasive. When cars move from autopilot to autonomous, you can not only rearrange the seats and remove the steering wheel, but perhaps transform our relationship with cars as the cost of ridesharing and robotaxis goes down so dramatically.

With the advent of large language models, we’re clearly already in the Autopilot Era of software engineering. Coding assistants like Cursor are helping individual computer programmers become much more productive, but largely within the scaffolding of programming environments that are optimized for humans: text editors optimized for humans like Visual Studio Code and programming languages optimized for humans like Python, all packaged as code completion so that the the computer programmer has to keep their hand on the steering wheel the entire time.

Despite the pace of innovation in coding assistants, it feels like we’re still missing some of the cornerstone ideas that could make truly autonomous software development a reality. What will software engineering look in the Autonomous Era, like when we get rid of the proverbial driver’s seat and steering wheel?

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