Companies are now hiring software engineers just to babysit agent sessions.

Which, if we're honest, is what most of us have been doing since December 2025.

The last time humans became this productive was the invention of the steam engine. This window will be just as short-lived.

The old advantage is disappearing

For decades, the core value software engineers delivered was their ability to solve complex problems through logic. The more complex the logic, the more experienced — and expensive — the developer you needed. Those developers, and the code they produced, were treated as assets. Their intelligence became a company-level differentiator.

Coding agents just put that advantage under existential threat. Every company can now spin up a high-IQ engineer that works continuously, never sleeps, and never gets tired.

So what do software engineers actually do next? And what becomes the new differentiating factor between software companies?

Software is becoming manufacturing

Look at manufacturing. There was a time when a highly skilled metalworker was a genuine competitive asset. Then came CNC machines, robotics, and full automation. Individual craft skill stopped being the primary differentiator. Throughput and quality took over.

The same transition is now hitting software. Only the companies that successfully turn themselves into dark software factories will have a durable edge.

Software engineers will no longer manually write every line of code. They will design the pipelines. The next generation of engineers will be pipeline maintainers and station owners rather than pure coders.

Their real job becomes:

gathering the right context
making sure agents have enough tokens and the right harnesses
building reliable runtimes and stations
designing the entire production line so that what leaves one station never needs to travel backward for rework

The new engineering KPIs

The new KPIs for software engineers will be simple and brutal:

Throughput
Quality
Reliability
Percentage of artifacts that flow through the pipeline without ever going backward

The companies that figure this out first won't just ship faster. They will operate like lights-out factories while everyone else is still arguing about how many agents one human can babysit.

The age of the individual 10x engineer is ending. The age of the 100x pipeline is beginning.

That is what we are trying to achieve with Codefac.