AI is powerful, but it needs us. It will fail. It will generate code that breaks, builds its own requirements, and introduces bugs that could have been avoided with human intervention.
This is where the narrative about AI replacing developers falls apart, and where the real opportunity comes from. Humans aren't becoming obsolete; we're becoming the essential intervention layer. Without human validation, guidance, and accountability guiding these tools, AI-generated software is just chaos waiting to collapse in production.
Let’s reference the past to understand the present and, likely, get insight for the future.. Accountants were still vital even when Excel drastically changed the industry. In fact, they evolved in the wake of this change. They stopped being human calculators and became strategic financial advisors. The same transformation is happening in software development, just faster. The developers who thrive won't be those who cling to their IDEs, but those who embrace a foundational shift: from code writers to product architects, from syntax specialists to customer outcome engineers.
This shift will feel uncomfortable, even threatening, for some. Prompt engineers are already becoming less relevant as AI evolves to understand intent more naturally. That discomfort is valid. Not everyone will make this transition, just as not everyone adapted when previous technological revolutions reshaped their industries. But discomfort breeds adaptation, and adaptation is the only path forward. We are in the midst of our next version of industrialization, and history shows us that those who resist these inflection points get left behind while those who lean in create entirely new categories of value. You must adapt.
But the true question is, where can we even adapt if this industrial revolution is moving so quickly?
I'm not entirely sure. We have to let this landscape develop and adapt as it unfolds.
What I can see clearly is the opportunity: companies will develop their own specialized tools and become more unique, not more homogeneous. AI democratizes creation, allowing organizations to rapidly build custom environments tailored to their specific workflows, unique problems, and distinct competitive advantages. More software will be created than ever before, deeply personalized and deployed instantly. The barriers to turning ideas into production systems are finally falling away.
But here's what that path forward actually demands: higher-level thinking focused on what problems truly need solving. As we witness in real time, AI capabilities are advancing rapidly, enabling systems to take on increasingly complex, longer-running workflows. This shift allows humans to focus on higher-level decisions while AI handles the execution.
The challenge isn't building agentic intelligence itself, it's building the infrastructure to support it: a new agentic stack that includes agent runtimes for isolation and control, orchestration for managing long-running agents and tools, and resilient communication both agent-to-agent and agent-to-tool. As we envision scaling to thousands or even millions of agents per person, the demands on this infrastructure only intensify.
What we see in today's AI builds is that existing systems aren't prepared to manage this scale. I saw this problem early on, and it's precisely why Temporal has become critical infrastructure for the AI era. Temporal provides best-in-class orchestration and resilient communication without being opinionated about specific agent frameworks. We integrate seamlessly with whatever tools you're using to build.
We've systematically addressed these challenges through a few strategic releases and integrations:
- OpenAI Agents SDK and Pydantic AI integrations – deterministic execution for non-deterministic AI operations
- Langfuse Workflows – comprehensive observability into AI pipelines
- AI Cookbook – production-ready recipes developers can immediately adapt and deploy
- SDK enhancements – optimized throughput and resource efficiency
- [New] Vercel AI SDK integration – interactive, long-running AI features for TypeScript developers without complex state management
- [New] Braintrust integration – complete workflow visibility for AI agents that traditional tools like OpenTelemetry can't trace
The additions we've made represent a vital shift in how AI systems are built. As AI grows smarter and tackles increasingly complex, longer-running workflows, a new agentic stack is emerging — one that requires agent runtimes for isolation and control, orchestration for managing persistent agents and tools, and resilient communication across the entire system. Temporal is evolving from a workflow orchestration platform into the critical infrastructure layer for this stack, solving durability, observability, and fault-tolerance at any scale, whether you're running ten agents or ten million. And we remain framework-agnostic, integrating seamlessly with whatever tools you use to build.
This infrastructure shift frees you to focus on higher-level decisions: what problems truly need solving, not how to keep systems running. You have the time for innovation.
We're at an inflection point. The developers who thrive will be those who see themselves as guardians of reliability and architects of outcomes. At Temporal, we're building the infrastructure that makes this transition possible: the reliability layer that transforms AI experiments into production systems. The future is coming whether we're ready or not. Be prepared.