The Software Engineer Centaur

This repository is a working notebook for essays about human–AI collaboration in software creation. The name references the “centaur” metaphor that emerged after Garry Kasparov’s 1997 match against IBM’s Deep Blue: Kasparov noted that the strongest chess force is a human–computer pair, where the human provides judgment, strategic direction, intuition, and creativity, while the computer contributes exhaustive calculation, perfect tactics, and objective evaluation. The combination is stronger than either part alone. That framing—and Ben Shneiderman’s 2020 discussion of human-centered AI partnerships—serves as creative inspiration. The repository documents practical experience, research synthesis, and governance patterns for developers who rely on AI copilots, autonomous agents, and sociotechnical automation.

Expect recurring themes such as:

• Structured models for aligning methodologies (Agile, DevOps, Lean) with AI-accelerated workflows
• Case studies showing what single developers can build with agentic assistance
• Reflections on sociotechnical design, safety, and governance for human-in-the-loop systems

Articles

Title	Synopsis
10× — The Coordination Shift: Software Engineering in the Centaur Era	Examines how human–AI “centaur” units change coordination economics. Builds six evaluation dimensions for delivery frameworks and six for organizational models, scoring Scrum, XP, Kanban, Lean Startup, DevOps/SRE, SAFe, LeSS, Waterfall, PRINCE2, OBAF and structures such as hierarchy, matrix, product teams, Team Topologies, platform orgs, Spotify, S3.0, Holacracy, Teal, Rendanheyi, and networked models. Highlights automated governance, boundary design, and a lockd case illustration.
Talking Down the Machine — Status, Attribution, and Coordination in Responses to Generative AI	Explores why engineers publicly deride AI while privately using it: status threats, negativity bias, machine heuristics, and attribution shifts. Connects social identity, reactance, and distributed cognition to trust calibration, showing how “centaur” orchestration plus verification converts stochastic generation into reliable team coordination.