Every few years, something arrives that promises to change how we build software. And every few years, the industry splits predictably: One half declares the old rules dead; the other half folds its arms and waits for the hype to pass. Both camps are usually wrong, and both camps are usually loud. What’s rarer, and more useful, is someone standing in the middle of that noise and asking the structural questions: Not “What can this do?” but “What does it mean for how we design systems?”
That’s what Neal Ford and Sam Newman did in their recent fireside chat on agentic AI and software architecture during O’Reilly’s Software Architecture Superstream. It’s a conversation worth pulling apart carefully, because some of what they surface is more uncomfortable than it first appears.