Superintelligent Software Engineering: Governance That Scales with Capability

Abstract

Software agents are being trained to exceed human engineers; we argue that capability alone does not produce better software engineering. We define superintelligent software engineering as the discipline of building and evolving software with agents whose capability exceeds that of human engineers, in which governance (gates, contracts, decisions and decay control) scales with capability. The argument rests on three claims. First, correctness in a project rests on decisions and contracts that the code does not carry. Second, knowledge decays. Third, once an agent outpaces its reviewers, reading catches a shrinking share of the changes built on stale knowledge. A simple model shows that, past a fixed review capacity, escaping changes grow linearly with throughput while the share that reading catches falls toward zero; governance can lower the slope, capability alone cannot. An exploratory snapshot of 452 of the most-starred public GitHub repositories finds a root-level or .github agent context file in 48.67% (95% confidence interval 44.1 to 53.3); in the median file that names repository paths, 9.5% to 22% of those paths do not resolve, depending on how a reference is read. We then present OSTEON, a discipline for the regime, released with a DOI (10.5281/zenodo.23436020): each project gets a governed knowledge repository of decisions and contracts, every change is checked mechanically against it, and the knowledge itself is checked for decay at every session start; planning is gated, and sessions record what they learn without writing rules. We report no measured effect of OSTEON, mark claims about its mechanisms as opinion and the author's practice heuristics as design rationale, and state the questions that would falsify the thesis.