Sivesh and I recently hosted a roundtable on the future of software engineering with Anthropic’s Ash Prabaker and we were joined by engineering leaders from Stripe, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Google DeepMind, xAI, Apple, Scale AI, as well as the legend Peter Steinberger of OpenClaw/OpenAI.

… A major thread throughout the discussion was “closed-loop” development. One participant described a setup at their company where bug reports are automatically triaged by an agent, bucketed by severity, checked against an eval set, and then a fix PR is opened — much of it running with minimal human touch. The room broadly agreed that this kind of loop is where compounding gains actually come from: better coding tools improve the models, better models improve the coding tools. Several people noted their companies are prioritizing coding specifically because of this dynamic.

… The room converged on long-horizon tasks as the real frontier problem. One participant noted that product engineering has started to go exponential for them, but closing the loop on more complex research workflows isn’t there yet. The open questions everyone shared: what do you actually assign an agent for a four- or five-hour run? How do you observe it? How do you keep a human in the loop without babysitting? Nobody had a clean answer. — Read More