Return of the Revenge of the Son of Software Process Engineering

I watched an interview recently with Claude Code creator Boris Cherny where he talked about how he doesn’t prompt anymore, he just “writes loops” that do the prompting for him. Putting aside the quality of the end product that’s producing, it’s fascinating watching a whole generation of AI-assisted and agentic developers reinvent something that’s been around for a long time. The last time I kept my hands clean with Software Process Engineering (I could have said “got my hands dirty”, but SPE always felt like the opposite to me) was when I was Development System Architect at Symbian in 2006-2007. Ostensibly, my job was to model Symbian’s software engineering processes, so we could add that to the mountain of other process documentation teams could ignore. You model engineering processes in pretty much the same way you’d model any business process. There are goals. There are roles. There are workflows. There’s information. There are rules. You get the picture. I’d created my own UML…