Andrew Abbott

Foreword

By Edo Segal

Every profession tells itself a story about why it matters. The doctor heals. The lawyer advocates. The engineer builds. These stories feel so natural that we forget they are stories -- constructed, defended, and sometimes demolished by forces far larger than any individual practitioner.

I have spent decades building technology companies, and for most of that time, I took the boundaries of my own profession for granted. Software engineers wrote code. Designers made interfaces. Product managers wrote specs. These divisions felt like physics -- immutable laws governing how things got built. Then, in the winter of 2025, I watched those boundaries dissolve in real time.

In a room in Trivandrum, India, I watched a backend engineer with no frontend experience build a complete user-facing feature in two days.