As I write this, I am on my way home from a software engineering conference where, of course, also the role of AI was extensively discussed. After listening to several presentations, I started to realize that everyone was talking about AI complementing the way we do work today rather than rethinking our current ways of working from scratch. In finance, there is concept called zero-based budgeting. Rather than starting from last year’s budget and making adjustments, the idea is that you start from scratch and reevaluate every expense as if you have never had the expense until now. Is it worth it, do we need it or can we accomplish the same thing in a different way? The same is true for much of software engineering. We need to start from scratch, start with giving everything to AI that it can (almost) do and then give the rest to humans to sort out. It’s scary and uncomfortable, but don’t you think your competitors are doing this right now?