AI is much more impressive but not much more useful. They improved on many things they were explicitly optimised for (coding,
I feel like this dramatically understates what progress feels like for programmers.
It’s hard to understand what a big deal 2025 was. Like if in 2024 my gestalt was “damn, AI is scary, good thing it hallucinates so much that it can’t do much yet”, in 2025 it was “holy shit, AI is scary useful!”. AI really started to make big stride in usefulness in Feb/March of 2025 and it’s just kept going.
I think the trailing indicators tell a different story, though. What they miss is that we’re rapidly building products at lower unit operating costs that are going to start generating compounding returns soon. It’s hard for me to justify this beyond saying I know what I and my friends are working on and things are gonna keep accelerating in 2026 because of it.
The experience of writing code is also dramatically transformed. A year ago if I wanted some code to do something it mostly meant I was going to sit at the keyboard and write code in my editor. Now it means sitting at my keyboard, writing a prompt, getting some code out, running it, iterating a couple times, and calling it a day, all with writing minimal code myself. It’s basically the equivalent of going from writing assemble to a modern language like JavaScript in a single year, something that actually took us 40.
I also think “usefulness” is a threshold phenomenon (to first order—that threshold being “benefits > costs”) so continuous progress against skills which will become useful can look somewhat discontinuous from the point of view of actual utility. Rapid progress in coding utility is probably due to crossing the utility threshold, and other skills are still approaching their thresholds.
Agree, and I already note that coding is the exception a few times throughout. That sentence is intended to counteract naive readings of “useful”. I’ll add a footnote anyway.
I feel like this dramatically understates what progress feels like for programmers.
It’s hard to understand what a big deal 2025 was. Like if in 2024 my gestalt was “damn, AI is scary, good thing it hallucinates so much that it can’t do much yet”, in 2025 it was “holy shit, AI is scary useful!”. AI really started to make big stride in usefulness in Feb/March of 2025 and it’s just kept going.
I think the trailing indicators tell a different story, though. What they miss is that we’re rapidly building products at lower unit operating costs that are going to start generating compounding returns soon. It’s hard for me to justify this beyond saying I know what I and my friends are working on and things are gonna keep accelerating in 2026 because of it.
The experience of writing code is also dramatically transformed. A year ago if I wanted some code to do something it mostly meant I was going to sit at the keyboard and write code in my editor. Now it means sitting at my keyboard, writing a prompt, getting some code out, running it, iterating a couple times, and calling it a day, all with writing minimal code myself. It’s basically the equivalent of going from writing assemble to a modern language like JavaScript in a single year, something that actually took us 40.
I also think “usefulness” is a threshold phenomenon (to first order—that threshold being “benefits > costs”) so continuous progress against skills which will become useful can look somewhat discontinuous from the point of view of actual utility. Rapid progress in coding utility is probably due to crossing the utility threshold, and other skills are still approaching their thresholds.
Agree, and I already note that coding is the exception a few times throughout. That sentence is intended to counteract naive readings of “useful”. I’ll add a footnote anyway.