For fifty years, the scarce thing in software was people who could write it. Every tool, team structure, and review practice we built assumes that scarcity. It's gone, and most of us are still optimiz… See more

For fifty years, the scarce thing in software was people who could write it. Every tool, team structure, and review practice we built assumes that scarcity. It's gone, and most of us are still optimizing the part that already works — buying faster generation for a bottleneck that moved somewhere else. I'm going to argue that the interesting question is no longer "is this good code?" but "if this is wrong, what's the blast radius?" — and that this single substitution reorganizes code review, CI, what deserves rigor, what can ship on merge, and what an engineer's job actually is. I'll show it from both sides: a platform being rebuilt so that the code is the real artifact its users own rather than an export of one, and an engineering org discovering it had to make the same move internally. These turned out to be the same bet, which was not the plan. I'll include what it cost, what we got wrong, and the conditions under which none of this applies to you. Sobre Utkarsh Sengar: Utkarsh Sengar is Chief Technology Officer at Webflow, working on one of the stickier, more interesting problems in software today: what design and code become once AI agents are first-class builders alongside humans. He's leading how Webflow builds for an agent-native web -nothing walled off, code that's real and portable, not locked into a closed system, and agents that can see and act on a project with the same fidelity a human designer has on the canvas. It's less "add AI features," more architecting how software gets built when your co-builder isn't human. He joined Webflow in 2022, following senior engineering leadership roles at Upwork, OpenTable, and eBay. He also advises early-stage founders through seed funds, and holds a Master's in Software Engineering from San José State. Outside of Webflow, he's usually hacking on side projects, or running with his wife and six-year-old. Show less