{"paper":{"title":"The End of Software Engineering: How AI Agents Are Fundamentally Restructuring the Software Paradigm","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.AI"],"primary_cat":"cs.SE","authors_text":"Zhenfeng Cao","submitted_at":"2026-06-04T02:30:06Z","abstract_excerpt":"For over half a century, software engineering has operated on a foundational premise: human engineers decompose problems, encode decision logic into static code, and manually adapt that code as requirements evolve. This paper argues that the emergence of AI agents -- systems where large language models serve as the primary reasoning engine, dynamically generating and discarding code as an instrumental resource -- constitutes not an incremental improvement but a fundamental restructuring of the software paradigm. Drawing on first-principles analysis of complexity scaling, we formalize the disti"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2606.05608","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2606.05608/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}