The Third Restructuring of Software Form: From the Three-Tier Architecture to Storage, Models, and Agents
Software form has undergone two paradigm shifts since its inception: Software 1.0, in which instructions determine behavior, and Software 2.0, in which data determines behavior (machine learning). This paper argues that a third shift - Software 3.0, in which context and reasoning determine behavior - is now underway, and contends that its terminal form converges to three elements: a generalized database (the unified abstraction of all persistent state and memory), a large model (the intelligence core that performs reasoning and generation), and an agent (the execution loop connecting the first two). The core argument is as follows: in the traditional three-tier architecture, the user-inte...
| Authors | Wei Lin, Tao Zhou, Zhaofei Xie et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 20 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 August 2026 |
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