The Rise of Medium Code

Through our work on Dagster, a data orchestrator deployed at companies large and small, we have seen a new class of software practitioners emerge. These practitioners go by titles like analytics engineer and data scientist. They aren’t full-stack engineers, but they still ship mission-critical code to production.

We call this new category medium code. It allows more people to write more production code, more productively, through more humane interfaces. It has been emerging for some time across multiple domains: data, infrastructure, front-end, and others. It is a powerful way to build and structure persona- and organization-spanning software platforms.

In discussing a new, novel class of software development, we cannot ignore AI. The tech community is rightly focused on AI's impact on software practitioners of all kinds. The demos of AI writing code are extraordinary, and AI is delivering real incremental value today. Many have concluded that AI will eliminate human-authored software creation entirely, including this emerging class of medium-code practitioners.

But we believe humans will remain in the driver's seat when it comes to building software and that medium code is AI-native development's natural target substrate. Code, languages, tools, models, and techniques will reflexively evolve and influence each other, but LLMs and AIs cannot author software unsupervised because human language is not precise enough to specify requirements.

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