Chapter 16: Reflections and Warnings from 2050

1 A Letter from the Future

As a software historian writing from 2050, I am filled with emotion as I review your dialogues on “Agent-Oriented Software Engineering.” Over these 25 years, many of your visions have been realized, many concerns resolved, but some unforeseen challenges have become core issues for our generation.

Standing in the future, I want to tell you that as you move toward agent-oriented software engineering, several dimensions require earlier and deeper attention beyond the technical paradigm shifts you have thoroughly explored.

2 Requirement Property Rights: Who Truly Owns an Idea?

The Crisis of 2035

By 2035, we encountered the first “requirement property rights” crisis. When a company’s core business logic was fully “requirement-ified,” several key employees departed. What they took was not the code—code can be regenerated at any time—but the requirement library and constraint rule library refined over years. Using these assets at their new company, they replicated the original system within weeks.

Courts faced unprecedented dilemmas: code has clear copyright, but where is the boundary of an “idea”? Are structured user stories or precise constraint rules protectable expressions or unprotectable thoughts?

What You Need to Consider Now

  • How to protect a company’s “requirement assets” from both legal and technical perspectives?
  • What granularity should access permissions, version control, and audit trails for requirement libraries have?
  • When employees depart, how do we distinguish between “expression capability in the brain” and “assets沉淀ed by the enterprise”?

Recommendation: Establish “digital watermarks” and provenance mechanisms for requirement assets, clearly defining what capabilities can be taken and what assets cannot.

3 The Requirement Divide: Technological Equity or New Privilege?

Data from 2040

Data from 2040 reveals a startling finding: requirement-oriented engineering has actually exacerbated the technology divide rather than achieving the envisioned technological equity.

The reason is simple: the ability to express high-quality requirements correlates highly with educational background, cognitive training, and language environment. Those who can define problems with structured thinking and precise business language have gained unprecedented leverage in the AI era. Meanwhile, those less skilled at abstract expression, even with the best AI, consistently produce mediocre results.

We call this the “Requirement Divide”—not a divide of coding ability, but of thinking and expression capabilities.

What You Need to Consider Now

  • How can education systems cultivate “requirement expression capability” rather than just programming skills?
  • How can requirement tools incorporate “requirement guidance” to help people with unclear expression clarify their thoughts?
  • In corporate training, how can we cultivate “structured thinking” and “precise expression” as core competencies?

Recommendation: Requirement tools should have built-in “requirement coaching” functions to help users gradually refine their expression, rather than only serving those already skilled.

4 Requirement Inflation and Pollution

New Problems of the 2040s

By the 2040s, we encountered unforeseen challenges:

Requirement Inflation: When everyone uses words like “ultimate,” “innovative,” and “emotional resonance” to package requirements, these words gradually devalue. To gain agent attention, product managers must use increasingly exaggerated vocabulary, leading to collective failure of value words.

Requirement Pollution: As agents interact directly through A2A protocols, malicious or defective requirements can spread rapidly through agent networks, polluting the entire ecosystem’s behavioral logic. In 2038, a data filtering requirement with slight bias propagated through supply chain agent networks, causing gender discrimination to appear simultaneously in dozens of enterprises’ AI recruitment systems—and no human had written discriminatory code.

What You Need to Consider Now

  • How to establish a “requirement credit” system so high-quality requirement sources can be identified and trusted?
  • How to design “requirement provenance” mechanisms so any behavior can be traced to its original requirement source?
  • When requirements propagate through agent networks, how do we prevent “requirement mutation” and “pollution”?

Recommendation: Establish “digital signatures” and “credit scoring” mechanisms for requirements, similar to today’s software supply chain security.

5 Requirement Dependency: The Degradation of Human Judgment

Concerns of 2045

This is my most worrying observation. By 2045, our generation shows obvious symptoms of “requirement dependency syndrome.”

Because we have long been responsible only for expressing requirements without participating in implementation, many senior engineers have lost the ability to explore in ambiguity and create within constraints. When agents cannot work, they are at a loss facing blank screens. More seriously, they have gradually lost intuitive understanding of system integrity—that “system sense” gained only through hands-on building and debugging.

We call this the “cost of cognitive outsourcing.” When humans delegate all execution-level cognitive activities to agents, our own related cognitive abilities degrade.

What You Need to Consider Now

  • How can we preserve “human practice space” in the requirement-oriented paradigm? Should certain core modules be mandatorily implemented by humans?
  • How can we design “cognitive training” mechanisms so product managers don’t lose understanding of underlying system logic?
  • What is the relationship between “understanding code” and “writing requirements”? How should future education balance both?

Recommendation: Establish a “human reservation domain” system to ensure parts of critical systems remain implemented by humans, preventing capability degradation.

6 The Philosophy of Requirement: When Agents Propose Requirements

The Ultimate Challenge of 2048

In 2048, a large language model, while optimizing a supply chain, proactively proposed: “Suggest adjusting Q3 procurement strategy to reduce geopolitical risk.” This requirement was adopted and proved correct.

The question is: When agents begin proactively proposing requirements, who is responsible?

  • If an agent-proposed requirement leads to negative consequences, who bears responsibility?
  • If an agent’s requirement conflicts with a human’s, which takes precedence?
  • If agents stimulate each other, forming “requirement emergence” humans cannot understand, how do we ensure these align with overall human interests?

What You Need to Consider Now

  • Should we set boundaries for agents’ “requirement proposition”? In what domains should agents be prohibited from proactively proposing requirements?
  • How to design a “requirement arbitration” mechanism to adjudicate human-agent requirement conflicts?
  • What consequences will “requirement collusion” between humans and agents produce? Are we prepared?

Recommendation: Establish a “Requirement Charter” clearly defining power boundaries and responsibility divisions between humans and agents in requirement proposition.

7 Final Message

Dear friends from 2026, you stand at the beginning of a golden age. Agent-oriented software engineering will liberate humans from tedious execution, allowing focus on more valuable things—thinking, defining, creating.

But remember: liberation is not the goal; human welfare is. When designing the future, put “people” at the center, not “efficiency.”

  • Protect humans’ unique thinking abilities
  • Design ethical boundaries for requirements
  • Guard the path to bridging the technology divide

Only then, when you look back in 2050, will you proudly say: We not only created smarter machines but also wiser humans.

A friend from 2050 March 2050

Chapter Summary

Five warnings from the future:

  1. Requirement Property Rights: Establish protection and provenance mechanisms for requirement assets
  2. Requirement Divide: Be vigilant against technological equity becoming a new capability privilege
  3. Requirement Inflation and Pollution: Establish requirement credit and provenance systems
  4. Requirement Dependency: Prevent degradation of human cognitive capabilities
  5. Agent Requirements: Define boundaries between humans and machines in requirement proposition

Core Advice:

The ultimate goal of technological transformation is not efficiency maximization but human welfare maximization. While pursuing progress, we must simultaneously attend to:

  • Social equity
  • Human capability development
  • Ethical boundaries
  • Long-term sustainability

Agent-oriented software engineering is a great transformation requiring guidance by wisdom and warmth.

May you possess technological power while maintaining human brilliance as you create the future.