One of the smartest engineers I know just introduced me to a term I hadn't heard before, and you probably haven't heard it either.
We were sharing takes about the future of agentic development when he casually mentioned that we are entering a "post-scarcity engineering" era.
It has really stuck with me.
We talked about post-scarcity engineering means, you can always write more code, because you can always run more agents. So you can always build more features. And more systems can be maintained and improved.
This is a stark contrast to quarterly planning and biweekly sprints.
You've probably felt 'PSE' vibes while building with agentic coding products.
You send a prompt to build a feature. Its done in seconds. You encounter a bug, so you send another prompt to solve the bug. It's done in seconds.
Prompting is inherently additive, so you build by moving forwards, rarely backwards. This is a post-scarcity feeling.
If you encounter a larger, more structural bug, you know that you can always rewrite your whole backend. All it means is sitting and waiting a little longer than usual. This is a post-scarcity feeling.
In a post-scarcity engineering era, the only bottlenecks in product development will be ideas (what you want to build), and distribution (how people find it). Everything else will scale with your ambition.
There will be flaws in these systems, and the tooling isn't there yet but I believe that this term will define the next era of computing. It will reshape consumer behaviours, redefine roles, and create massive new opportunities.
What do you think the post-scarcity engineering era will entail?