The Day After AI

Making Software Companies Legible to AI Agents
1. Auflage 2027
ISBN: 979-8-8688-3451-6
Verlag: APRESS L.P.

Buch, Englisch, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm

AI agents are becoming more capable, but many software systems remain difficult for them to navigate. Critical business knowledge is often scattered across conversations, documents, and the minds of experienced team members. This hidden context creates a barrier that many organizations must address before they can fully benefit from AI-assisted development.
At the center of the book is the concept of system legibility: the ability for people, AI agents, and automated workflows to understand how a business operates without constant human explanation. Through a contract-driven architecture model, readers learn how to capture capabilities, dependencies, and business rules in a form that can be shared, governed, and scaled.
The book begins by identifying tribal knowledge as a structural obstacle to AI adoption. It then introduces capability contracts, capability graphs, and the Contract-Driven AI Development (C-DAD) framework. You will learn how to surface hidden knowledge from existing systems, govern contracts through their lifecycle, and create a navigable map of organizational capabilities. The final section focuses on transformation, showing how architects, developers, product managers, designers, and leaders can adapt their roles in a contract-driven organization.
Using realistic examples from both established and emerging software companies, the book offers a practical roadmap for organizations that want to build systems that are easier to understand, evolve, and operate in the age of AI agents.

What You Will Learn

• Identify and measure tribal knowledge debt in software organizations
• Understand system legibility and its impact on AI adoption
• Surface undocumented business rules in brownfield environments without requiring a rewrite
• Build contract-first practices for new and existing systems

Who This Book Is For

Software architects, senior developers, engineering managers, product managers, CTOs, and engineering leaders preparing their organizations for AI-assisted development and long-term system evolution

Zielgruppe

Professional/practitioner

Autoren/Hrsg.

Piovesan, Enrico

Fachgebiete

• Mathematik | Informatik EDV | Informatik Programmierung | Softwareentwicklung Software Engineering
• Mathematik | Informatik EDV | Informatik Informatik Künstliche Intelligenz
• Mathematik | Informatik EDV | Informatik Betriebssysteme Linux Betriebssysteme, Open Source Betriebssysteme

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Opening Scene - Monday Morning.- I. The Problem.- 1. The Day After.- 2. Tribal Knowledge Is the Bottleneck.- 3. Contracts Are the Answer.- II. The Architecture.- 4. The Capability Graph.- 5. Extraction Over Refactoring.- 6. The Contract Lifecycle.- III. The Transformation. - 7. The Architect.- 8. The Developer.- 9. The PM and PO.- 10. The Designer.- 11. The Leadership Team.- 12. The Company That Gets There First.- Appendices.

Über Autor(innen)

Enrico Piovesan is a Platform Architect at Autodesk with over twenty years of experience designing and restructuring large-scale software systems. He is the author of (Apress, 2026) and the creator of the Contract-Driven AI Development (C-DAD) framework, a whitepaper he published before the Model Context Protocol wave validated the concept of machine-readable capability contracts as a coordination layer for AI agents.

Enrico writes the Medium publication Mastering Software Architecture for the AI Era, a series of practitioner-focused articles that form the research foundation of this book. He has spent the last year working at the intersection of legacy system modernization and AI agent readiness, helping engineering organizations understand why their systems are opaque to agents and what structural changes are required to fix that.