Code is shifting phases

Until recently, writing software was expensive. It required skill and time. This shaped how we think about code, treating it as an artifact, a noun, a thing we maintained, versioned, and reused. Codebases. Repositories. The entire infrastructure of software engineering is built around code as a noun.

But this was never the essence of code. Code was always a bridge between intent and execution. You want new software, a new feature, some DB migration, making robot fingers move, you write code and make it happen. We just forgot, because the bridge was so expensive to build, that we started treating it like a monument. A noun. An artifact.

But this is changing. With LLMs, code is becoming a verb. An act. You describe your intent, code is generated and run, and you see the execution. The code isn't the point, the outcome is.

Even in my daily workflow, i see this shift. My agents write hundreds to thousands of lines of code every day that run once and are never touched again. One-off scripts. Quick automations. Throwaway tools. I built an app for a three-day trip. It did exactly what I needed, exactly how I needed it, and I never opened it again. That's not a product. That's code as a verb.

The phase shift is changing how I think.

When I encounter a task now, my first instinct is can this be done through code? When I hand something to an agent, I'm thinking can it write iterative code/scripts to handle this? And when the answer is no, my next thought is what would need to exist so that it could?

What API, what library, what protocol, what integration would make this intent executable?

This creates a powerful feedback loop. Human has intent. Agent tries to execute via code. Execution fails because some capability doesn't exist as a programmable surface. That gap becomes demand. Someone builds that surface. Now an entire class of human intent becomes executable through code.

I believe we'll see a wave of software and infrastructure built specifically to give agents the ability to do things that haven't been possible through code before. IoT, institutional APIs, real-world integrations, all driven by this loop of intent seeking execution paths.

Maybe "Make something agents want" ?

Code as an artifact isn't going away. There will always be codebases, products, and systems that need to be built, maintained, and evolved carefully.

But code as an execution medium, disposable, personal, contextual, regenerated on demand is growing exponentially. It's the part that was always suppressed by cost, and now the cost is collapsing.

The phase of code is shifting. We're just at the beginning.