AI Agent Skills: History Repeating
Agent skills feel unprecedented until you line them up against subroutines, objects, services and microservices. Software engineering renegotiates its boundaries every fifteen to twenty years — and the agentic era is the latest turn of the same wheel.
What this episode is about
Agent skills feel unprecedented until you line them up against subroutines, objects, services and microservices. Software engineering renegotiates its boundaries every fifteen to twenty years — and the agentic era is the latest turn of the same wheel.
The Software Lens is a research series and video channel on software architecture for the age of AI agents, by Imtiaz Hassan. It exists because the same architectural questions kept coming up on real engagements and deserved a proper answer rather than a slide: what actually changes when software starts reasoning at call time, which existing patterns survive that change, and which quietly stop working. Each episode takes one of those questions and argues it through.
How to use it
Every episode has a written companion in the Library, so you can watch the argument and then read the detail with the diagrams, the references and the parts that do not fit into video. The written pieces are published in reading order — Foundations first, then SaaC, then AIM, then the Agentic Economy — and each assumes the one before it.
If it is relevant to something you are building, the written companion has the detail and the diagrams, and a comment on the episode is the quickest way to ask a question.