Maggie Appleton explores a near-future scenario where a single developer orchestrates dozens of AI coding agents simultaneously — and why this creates a serious alignment problem. Without structured coordination, multiple agents working in parallel can produce conflicting, redundant, or misaligned outputs, even when each individual agent performs well on its assigned task.

To address this challenge, Appleton introduces Ace, a multiplayer coding workspace designed to bring order to multi-agent software development. Ace reimagines the developer environment as a coordination layer, giving humans visibility and control over agent swarms rather than leaving them to operate in isolated silos.

The piece argues that the future of software engineering is less about writing code and more about managing, aligning, and directing fleets of AI agents — a fundamentally collaborative and supervisory role that current tooling is not yet built to support.