It's time to be right.

It’s time to be right. Outcomes continue to matter. Earlier this week, I spoke at AI Dev 26. This is what I spoke about there. I’ve been making money, in some form, building software for nearly 30 years. The last five months have been the most exciting of that entire time. I’m extremely optimistic about the future of software, and the future of software engineering as a field. But I have a hypothesis about agentic AI for development, and for knowledge work broadly: in future, the size of the opportunity for agentic AI will be more limited by defect rate than capabilities. Let’s break that down a little bit, by thinking about defects along two axes: how serious the defects are, and how frequent they are. These axes intentionally conflate two inputs&emdash;how hard the problems are and how capable agents are at solving them&emdash;and focus only on the output that matters most: user-experienced defects. We’re also focusing on outputs from an AI agent here. Agents are feedback loops.…