What Cannot Be Delegated?

Making implementation cheaper does not make software engineering easy; it changes where the difficulty lies.

Across this Part, implementation has moved without making engineering responsibility disappear. Autonomous systems can assume more realization, analysis, transformation, and routine validation. The engineer's work moves toward deciding what must be true, choosing representations that make consequential properties understandable, establishing what evidence is sufficient, allocating authority, making tradeoffs, and determining whether the resulting system is fit to accept.

None of those categories defines a permanent list of tasks reserved for humans. Better machines may participate in all of them. The durable distinction is not between work a machine can perform and work it cannot. It is between delegating an act and delegating responsibility for the engineered whole.

The Preface asked what we can safely delegate. The Conclusion approaches the same boundary from the other direction:

What cannot be delegated?