Zhenfeng Cao

Zhenfeng Cao

For over half a century, software engineering has operated on a foundational premise: human engineers decompose problems, encode decision logic into static code, and manually adapt that code as requirements evolve. This paper argues that the emergence of AI agents -- systems where large language models serve as the primary reasoning engine, dynamically generating and discarding code as an instrumental resource -- constitutes not an incremental improvement but a fundamental restructuring of the software paradigm. Drawing on first-principles analysis of complexity scaling, we formalize the distinction between traditional software (where code is the carrier of decision logic) and agentic systems (where code is ephemeral tooling for an LLM-driven reasoning loop). We trace the historical arc from licensed software to SaaS to what we term Agent-as-a-Service (AaaS), showing that each shift transferred additional complexity away from end-users. We introduce the concept of Agentic Engineering as an emergent discipline -- distinct from software engineering in its core object of study, control model, and human role. Through analysis of recent benchmark evidence including SWE-bench Verified, EvoClaw, and LangChain's multi-agent coordination studies, we demonstrate both the transformative potential of the agentic paradigm and its current limitations. We conclude with a four-stage roadmap toward self-evolving agent ecosystems and concrete recommendations for practitioners navigating this transition.

Zhenfeng Cao

A human brain is capable of continual learning by nature; however the current mainstream deep neural networks suffer from a phenomenon named catastrophic forgetting (i.e., learning a new set of patterns suddenly and completely would result in fully forgetting what has already been learned). In this paper we propose a generic learning model, which regards a learning system as a fiber bundle. By comparing the learning performance of our model with conventional ones whose neural networks are multilayer perceptrons through a variety of machine-learning experiments, we found our proposed model not only enjoys a distinguished capability of continual learning but also bears a high information capacity. In addition, we found in some learning scenarios the learning performance can be further enhanced by making the learning time-aware to mimic the episodic memory in human brain. Last but not least, we found that the properties of forgetting in our model correspond well to those of human memory. This work may shed light on how a human brain learns.