The Software Death Cross

When I started exploring ways to publish this book, I heard an episode of The Daily from the New York Times that stopped me mid-stride. The guest was Clive Thompson, the technology journalist and author of Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, discussing his article “Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It.” I went and read the piece that afternoon, because Thompson had done something I recognized immediately: he had walked into the same river.

The river of intelligence I described in Chapter 5 does not care about publishing schedules. It does not wait for your book to be finished before it sends the next wave of evidence downstream. Thompson traveled the entire country and spoke to more than seventy-five software developers at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and small startups. I sat in rooms in Trivandrum and Tel Aviv and San Francisco and watched the same transformation through the lens of my own team. We were swimming in the