“Why Software Automation Is Hard” by silentbob

Originally intended as a quick take, but got a bit longer, so why not turn it into a post. Just sharing my observations & assumptions here about the state of software automation. Happy to hear thoughts on where you think I'm off. I'm sure none of the thoughts in this post are totally original, many have been proposed in similar form elsewhere, and I'm[1] far from the first person to speak of the bottlenecks that AI progress and adoption are facing. It still seemed useful to compile my current views on the situation and summarize them to those with only an outside view on the impact of AI on the software industry. The software world is trying hard to automate itself. Undoubtedly, coding agents have made a step change since last November and now enable more and more use cases that were unthinkable a year ago. And yet it seems to me that there's still a big disconnect between how many people think coding agents should be affecting the software industry and what's really going on so far in most places. Please feel encouraged share your views and disagreements about any of these in the [...] ---Outline:(02:37) Problems and Bottlenecks(17:08) The Bull Case(19:42) What Now? The original text contained 11 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: June 6th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KzXptMbuDsYLrppss/why-software-automation-is-hard --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.