From Boeing 747 to Waymo

Software tooling used to look like the cockpit of a Boeing 747. Hundreds of dials and switches, a pre-flight checklist, a third crew member whose entire job was watching the gauges. Only a handful of people were ever trained to fly it. Then ChatGPT, Cursor, and Claude Code happened, and the cockpit turned into a manual car. Anyone can drive it, but it still wants an intimate feel for the machinery: when the clutch goes in, which gear belongs to which hill, what the engine is telling you. Every month it slides closer to an automatic. So what will it look like in a year, maybe two? Will software engineering feel like getting into a Waymo? The arrow has pointed in one direction the entire time, away from inputs and outputs, toward intent and outcomes.

Every layer of the stack has taken the same ride. Assembly to C, and you stopped thinking about registers. C to Python, and you stopped thinking about memory. Frameworks took HTTP. Vercel and Supabase took the servers. Now agents are taking the syntax. Take away every knob and what's left is intent. A Waymo doesn't ask you to drive. It asks where you're going, then handles the merging, the lane changes, the parallel parking. The question moves from how to where.

When the automatic arrived, driving became more accessible. More people were able to learn, more people drove, and the world quietly reorganized around them: suburbs, road trips, supermarkets, drive-thrus. None of it was predictable from looking at a gearbox. The same question is now open for software. What does the world look like when there are more builders in it than ever? It's too soon for concrete answers. That's what makes it interesting.

Building a software company already feels like directing a movie. The director doesn't operate the camera or rig the lights. They hold the picture of what the film should feel like, watch the take, and ask for another one. Taste, judgment, the ability to spot the bad take in a pile of plausible ones. Those are the dials on the new dashboard, and they're harder to learn than the old ones. So what story do you want to tell the world?