What's an engineer? It's somebody who solves problems in the context of constrained resources. Every project has its own particular set of constraints, but there are some ever-present limitations that we've taken for granted for so long, that we don't even see them anymore. For electrical engineers, Ohm's Law isn't likely to change any time soon. For structural engineers, gravity is a constant (at least on Earth!). Software engineering can be seen as having fewer physical constraints - but one that comes to mind is Brooks' Law, after the author of The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks. The essence of this law, to quote from the book, is "the bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned". This law has many corollaries, the best known of which is "adding people to a late software project makes it later". But what happens when you add more Agents?
Now I'm not going to suggest that Brooks' Law is broken, and that we are in an age of infinite productivity. But I do think that a fundamental constant has changed value. The amount of work one person can get done, when using a suitably tamed LLM, has changed so much that it moves the bottlenecks in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) to either end of the construction phase. Organizations will need to ideate faster, and deploy completed code faster, if they are to keep up with the speed of development. Constraints remain, but they have shifted dramatically. And roles have changed too.
Where I work, in 8 West, we've seen that the "AI-curious" phase of engineering is officially over. In just one year, the number of engineers using AI across 5+ daily use cases has jumped from 28% to 56%, shifting the baseline proficiency from beginner to intermediate. The constraint shift I described above is changing the nature of what it means to be a software engineer. And within that category, what it means to be Junior, Mid, Senior - and how to move up through these levels. Being a skilled software engineer was never about who was the best coder. That was one factor among many - a necessary but insufficient condition to be a senior dev. In the context of 8 West's Technology Partner business model, the ability to understand customer needs, to communicate, to be empathetic with clients and colleagues alike - these are the factors that we look for first when conducting interviews. This much is not going to change. But the technical skills that we look for, and train for, are shifting from authoring code, to curating LLM context. And we're wrapping the raw power of LLMs with Agentic Frameworks, Workflow Models, and DevOps Harnesses, in order to run at full speed without compromising quality, security and reliability.
The most recent phase of LLM-assisted development in 8 West has involved learning by doing, and internalising the resulting lessons. LLMs are "just another technology" and like the advances that have come before, there are more wrong ways than right when it comes to using them. Our senior developers and architects have acquired a felt sense of those rights and wrongs, and are transmitting them to their junior colleagues. When we assimilate new technologies, we apply the acronym EAT: Evaluate, Adopt, Tame. This last phase is often overlooked, but it's a crucial differentiator for successful adoption. You need to understand the technology enough to make it work within your organization, and that entails harnessing the technology correctly, and changing processes and roles within the organization. Our junior developers are being trained to structure problems clearly, to interrogate outputs critically, and to build the judgement required to work effectively with AI systems from day one. Our senior developers are moving up the business abstraction hierarchy. Our architects are mapping AI technologies onto the SDLC, and creating development platforms that embody their collective industry experience in a way that just 12 months ago was hard to imagine.
Constraints remain. The engineers who recognise where they’ve moved will be the ones who move fastest.
#ContextEngineering #AIAgents #8WestConsulting #BrooksLaw