Software's Centaur Era

t’s 2030. I wake up, make my coffee, drag myself over to my laptop. Then I remember – AI has completely replaced knowledge work. I open up my agent chat, type “still got access to my bank account? Please continue making money.”

I hesitate. Should I add something else? Nudge the AI toward a problem area I personally judge to be important or interesting? I resist, for as that would constitute knowledge work (which AI has entirely replaced), it would strictly decrease my expected return.

I scratch that itch instead by starting Wordle with something other than SLATE. I solve in 5, finish my coffee, and then get to work at my side gig: driving around doing TaskRabbit jobs at the behest of AIs that are not (yet) otherwise capable of influencing the physical world.

There was a teenager on r/programming worried about going to college and majoring in computer science, asking – is AI going to automate away all the software jobs? I went back to my alma mater and was visiting with one of my computer science professors. She told me the major was shrinking, presumably also because of AI fears.

So how about it? Will AI automate away all the software jobs?

I think it’s easy to miss how extreme a scenario this is, economically. Software jobs don’t necessarily disappear if AI surpasses humans at writing software – the jobs might change in nature, sure – but they don’t really disappear unless there is truly nothing left for humans to contribute to the process.

Take chess. Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997, but for a long period of time after that, the best chess performance didn’t come from engines playing by themselves – it came from “centaurs” – a colorful term for a team composed of a skilled human wielding a chess engine. Now the centaur era of chess is over – the best engines are so good that a grandmaster steering them only weakens them – but this is a recent development: the centaur era lasted for decades.

Is the software industry in its centaur era right now? No. Not even. The coding agent equivalent of Deep Blue hasn’t even beaten Kasparov yet.

You can hire a grandmaster-level software engineer, leave them pretty much alone, and trust that they will start making valuable contributions to long-term projects and will reliably be making your software system better. That’s just not true (yet) of any of these coding agents. If you leave them alone without human steering, they go off the rails pretty quickly. If you just set an AI coding agent (and an AI reviewer) loose with your product roadmap and let them merge things, your codebase (and product) gets real broken, real quick. Claude built its vibe-coded C compiler, Cursor built their vibe-coded browser – it’s true. But being able to reliably make independent progress on long-horizon projects? This is the economic core of why software engineers are valuable. And it is the absolute frontier of what these models are just beginning to become capable of.

But even if coding agents nail it, and become able to reliably improve software, it’s not over for the humans. As long as humans have something to contribute – as long as teams of humans and agents working together are more effective than teams of agents alone, there will always be room for humans in the software industry. We’re not over until the Centaur Era is over, and it hasn’t even really begun yet.