AXIOS (Zachary Basu) - AI's "centaur phase" consumes Silicon Valley
A manic new phase of the AI boom is sweeping through Silicon Valley, powered by autonomous "agents" capable of liquefying weeks of manual labor into minutes. Why it matters: For now, the frenzy is largely confined to software engineering . But inside that bubble, the shift feels seismic — deepening the gulf between AI builders and bystanders. - "I've followed tech for 25 years and I've never felt a larger gap between the ~1 million people using Codex/Claude and the rest of humanity," tweeted James Wang, director of product marketing at Cerebras. The big picture: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently described the current state of software engineering as the "centaur phase" — a reference to the half-human, half-horse creature of Greek…