Software engineers' new job isn't writing code — it's designing the boundaries AI agents can't break

If you look at the commit histories of modern data platforms, something profound has shifted over the last two years. The friction of writing syntax has collapsed. With Cursor, Claude Code, and agentic workflows now living inside our Docker containers and IDEs, generating the first implementation of a distributed streaming pipeline or a complex API integration is no longer the central bottleneck.Agents can navigate …