The market has shifted. Anthropic hires generalists with “quirky side projects” over narrow specialists. OpenAI seeks “builders who thrive in ambiguity.” Spotify’s best engineers have not written a line of code since December 2025 — they orchestrate AI agents while making architectural decisions the machines cannot. The signal is clear: when AI fills in the implementation details, you need people who think in systems.

That is what thirty years of breadth gives you. I have built production pipelines, run multi-million-pound delivery programmes, and operated platforms for Vodafone, Nestlé, NatWest, and the BBC. AI amplifies everything I already know — and you cannot shortcut that context. Most contractors are infrastructure specialists who have never managed a client engagement, or consultants who have never touched a pipeline. I have done both.

“Grady Booch calls this the third golden age of software engineering — the age of systems. I have been building for all three.”

I have been early to every wave. XP and TDD when they were fringe. Agile before it was the default. Cloud-native and containerisation before the industry caught up. VentureBeat now argues that hiring specialists made sense before AI — now generalists win. This is the shift I have spent three decades preparing for.

I am not theorising about AI-native engineering. I am practising it — writing the book on Spec Driven Development and building the tooling. I conduct the agents. They build the software. The entire lifecycle ships through deterministic automation.