CONCEPT
Software Engineering as a Practice
The claim — central to MacIntyre's application to AI — that software engineering meets the criteria of a genuine practice: internal goods, standards of excellence, and a tradition of argument about what good software is.
Whether software engineering constitutes a genuine practice in MacIntyre's sense is a consequential question, because the answer determines what is at stake when AI transforms the work. This book argues that software engineering, at its best, does qualify. It has internal goods — the elegance of well-designed architecture, the satisfaction of systems that respond precisely to their intended purpose, the beauty of code that only another practitioner can perceive. It has standards of excellence that practitioners extend and revise. It has a tradition — a historically extended argument about what good software is, what methods best serve it, and what the practice is for — that runs from the earliest programmers working in assembly through structured programming, object-oriented design, agile methodologies, and the debates of the AI-mediated era.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The objection that software engineering is too young, too commercial, or too output-focused to qualify as a