Software’s Centaur Era

Software’s Centaur Era by Richard Marmorstein - May 18, 2026

It’s 2030. I wake up, make my coffee, drag myself over to my laptop. Then I remember – AI has completely replaced knowledge work. I open up my agent chat, type “still got access to my bank account? Please continue making money.” I hesitate. Should I add something else? Nudge the AI toward a problem area I personally judge to be important or interesting? I resist, for as that would constitute knowledge work (which AI has entirely replaced), it would strictly decrease my expected return. I scratch that itch instead by starting Wordle with something other than SLATE. I solve in 5, finish my coffee, and then get to work at my side gig: driving around doing TaskRabbit jobs at the behest of AIs that are not (yet) otherwise capable of influencing the physical world.

现在是 2030 年。我醒来，煮好咖啡，把自己拖到笔记本电脑前。然后我记起来了——人工智能已经完全取代了知识工作。我打开智能体聊天窗口，输入：“我的银行账户还能用吗？请继续帮我赚钱。”我犹豫了一下。我应该再加点什么吗？引导 AI 去关注我个人认为重要或有趣的问题领域？我克制住了，因为那属于知识工作（AI 已经完全取代了它），这样做只会降低我的预期收益。为了满足这种冲动，我转而去玩 Wordle，这次不用 SLATE 开局。我用了 5 步解开谜题，喝完咖啡，然后开始我的副业：在 AI 的指挥下四处奔波做 TaskRabbit 任务，因为这些 AI 目前还无法直接影响物理世界。

There was a teenager on r/programming worried about going to college and majoring in computer science, asking – is AI going to automate away all the software jobs? I went back to my alma mater and was visiting with one of my computer science professors. She told me the major was shrinking, presumably also because of AI fears. So how about it? Will AI automate away all the software jobs?

Reddit 的 r/programming 板块上有一个青少年很担心上大学选修计算机科学专业，他问道：AI 会让所有的软件工作自动化消失吗？我回到母校拜访了一位计算机科学教授。她告诉我，该专业的学生人数正在减少，大概也是因为对 AI 的恐惧。那么，情况究竟如何？AI 会让所有的软件工作都消失吗？

I think it’s easy to miss how extreme a scenario this is, economically. Software jobs don’t necessarily disappear if AI surpasses humans at writing software – the jobs might change in nature, sure – but they don’t really disappear unless there is truly nothing left for humans to contribute to the process.

我认为，从经济学角度来看，人们很容易忽略这种情景有多极端。如果 AI 在编写软件方面超越了人类，软件工作并不一定会消失——工作的性质可能会改变，这是肯定的——但除非人类在这一过程中真的无事可做，否则工作本身不会真正消失。

Take chess. Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997, but for a long period of time after that, the best chess performance didn’t come from engines playing by themselves – it came from “centaurs” – a colorful term for a team composed of a skilled human wielding a chess engine. Now the centaur era of chess is over – the best engines are so good that a grandmaster steering them only weakens them – but this is a recent development: the centaur era lasted for decades.

以国际象棋为例。1997 年“深蓝”击败了卡斯帕罗夫，但在那之后的很长一段时间里，最强的国际象棋表现并非来自独立运行的引擎，而是来自“半人马”（centaurs）——这是一个生动的术语，指由熟练的人类操控国际象棋引擎组成的团队。现在，国际象棋的“半人马时代”已经结束了——最强的引擎已经强大到连特级大师的干预只会拖后腿的地步——但这只是最近才发生的事：半人马时代持续了几十年。

Is the software industry in its centaur era right now? No. Not even. The coding agent equivalent of Deep Blue hasn’t even beaten Kasparov yet. You can hire a grandmaster-level software engineer, leave them pretty much alone, and trust that they will start making valuable contributions to long-term projects and will reliably be making your software system better. That’s just not true (yet) of any of these coding agents. If you leave them alone without human steering, they go off the rails pretty quickly. If you just set an AI coding agent (and an AI reviewer) loose with your product roadmap and let them merge things, your codebase (and product) gets real broken, real quick.

软件行业现在处于“半人马时代”吗？不，完全不是。编程智能体领域的“深蓝”甚至还没能击败“卡斯帕罗夫”。你可以雇佣一名特级大师级别的软件工程师，让他们独立工作，并相信他们会为长期项目做出有价值的贡献，可靠地改善你的软件系统。但对于目前的任何编程智能体来说，这还做不到。如果你不加干预地让它们独立工作，它们很快就会偏离轨道。如果你只是把 AI 编程智能体（以及 AI 审查员）放任在产品路线图上，让它们自行合并代码，你的代码库（和产品）很快就会彻底崩溃。

Claude built its vibe-coded C compiler, Cursor built their vibe-coded browser – it’s true. But being able to reliably make independent progress on long-horizon projects? This is the economic core of why software engineers are valuable. And it is the absolute frontier of what these models are just beginning to become capable of.

Claude 构建了它的“氛围编程”（vibe-coded）C 编译器，Cursor 构建了他们的“氛围编程”浏览器——这是事实。但能够可靠地在长期项目中取得独立进展呢？这才是软件工程师具有价值的经济核心。而这正是这些模型刚刚开始具备能力的绝对前沿。

But even if coding agents nail it, and become able to reliably improve software, it’s not over for the humans. As long as humans have something to contribute – as long as teams of humans and agents working together are more effective than teams of agents alone, there will always be room for humans in the software industry. We’re not over until the Centaur Era is over, and it hasn’t even really begun yet.

但即使编程智能体做到了这一点，能够可靠地改进软件，人类的时代也不会终结。只要人类还有贡献的价值——只要人类与智能体协作的团队比单纯的智能体团队更有效率，软件行业就永远会有人类的一席之地。在“半人马时代”结束之前，我们不会被淘汰，而这个时代甚至还没有真正开始。