Bret Taylor: preference

Transcript context

…Why should you care about the code? Why should I care about the code? I care about correctness, I care about robustness, and I think I know intellectually, I don't need to look at how the compiler unrolled this loop to verify its elegance and correctness. Yet somehow I feel that way about code. I'm not saying the code doesn't matter, but I've been trying to force myself to not care because I feel like I won't be a self-actualized software engineer in the future if I'm too precious about that artifact which used to be so central to me. Right now, writing markdown files, maybe that's fine. It feels somewhat like a local maximum, and maybe we'll just be like, "Oh, of course, markdown is how we work with machines." If you think about what a compiler does, there's this interesting mix of formality and informality, and if you've used Python versus Rust, different ends of the spectrum. Now that you're not writing the code, I really wonder what that programming system should feel like and look like. I don't mind chatting with Codex, that's fine. But I also think, as you imagine, all the tests that you care about, it showing you demos and mockups. I wonder what the future integrated development environment, for lack of a better term, will be in that world. What I'm trying to do is force myself to not be emotionally attached to the code, which is very hard for me because that was my entire life before. I was proud of the elegance of the code that I wrote. But if I still care about the craftsmanship, what do I want? I haven't quite visualized it yet. It feels to me like a very interesting time in agentic engineering because you were talking about this domain of harness engineering and people having skills and MCP and everything like that. It's always interesting when not only is the leading product in a category changing, we're actually just figuring out what the categories are that we need things for MCP or skills or stuff like that, and it's all very fast-moving. That just feels to me like a very interesting time where clearly a new way of engineering is shaking out. 2026 is clearly not the final word.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.