The opening paper of the series and the conceptual foundation for everything that follows. It argues that 2026 marks a structural inflection point in software engineering: the locus of human effort is migrating away from code execution and toward intent definition and output verification. Where engineers once spent their days typing implementations, they now spend them describing what they want and checking that machines delivered it. The paper introduces the "coder to conductor" framing — the engineer no longer plays the instrument, but conducts an orchestra of agents — and sets out the 2026 engineering landscape that the subsequent papers explore in depth.
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