Software engineering is at a crossroads. AI isn’t just another tool. It’s forcing us to rethink how we build systems.

Many organizations are starting down the evolutionary path: adding language models alongside databases, prompts alongside queries, and chatbots in their UIs. But the bigger opportunity follows a more revolutionary path: AI agents driving dynamic behavior from the middle out.

That path creates new opportunities and new risks. But it is untraversable in the traditional model of applications, with their siloed and hardwired views and queries. Even fine-grained microservices aren’t flexible enough, because they are still fundamentally assembled stackwise.

The Wedge

Agentic middleware will reach its full potential only when it splits apart presentation and data access layers, freeing them to be used in adaptive context-driven interactions: business data and generated