Software’s third age is the name Grady Booch gives, as cited by Addy Osmani, to the present shift toward AI coding agents: a new golden era of software engineering defined by a further rise in the level of abstraction, in which the developer’s job moves from writing instructions to defining intent. Osmani places it within the same long historical arc that ran from bits to instructions, instructions to functions, functions to objects, objects to services, and services to distributed systems — describing the current step as a move from writing code to orchestrating systems that write code.