July 2026 Summaries

Chapter 2 of the book explores the evolution of coordination in software development, tracing the shift from waterfall to agile, DevOps, platform engineering, and the emerging Agentic Order. Each era addressed a new scarcity, such as certainty, learning, accountability, or attention, and developed coordinating artifacts like documents, iterations, pipelines, and platforms. These eras marked a progression towards reducing human effort in coordination, allowing more focus on value creation. The latest shift to the Agentic Order, characterized by AI agents making decisions, introduces judgment as the new scarce human capability. This era demands a new coordinating artifact that preserves and propagates human judgment as work flows between humans and agents. The book aims to describe how this new coordination can be achieved, emphasizing the importance of maintaining intent and context to ensure the integrity of decisions made by both humans and agents.