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I have written this essay in an attempt to coldly and analytically wrestle with something that for decades has seemed like a science fiction ghost story. Upon looking at the publicly available data, I’ve found myself persuaded that what can seem to many like a fanciful story may instead be a real trend. If this trend continues, we may be about to witness a profound change in how the world works

Even if agents do more of the work, the human still needs understanding to direct them. You need to know what is worth building, what question matters, what result is suspicious, and what tradeoff is acceptable.

A forge shouldn't do everything. Issue tracking yes. Kanban board, probably not. Wiki? I doubt it. Everything tools always turn into crap. You add features when its easy to add features and then pay the maintenance price for those features forever regardless of their rate of adoption because now someone, somewhere uses them and you are locked in.

This is probably the most useful explanation of how to create a skill that I've seen. I have definitely fallen into giving step by step instructions trap. I am definitely going to take some of this advice.

A second question to ask, is if we find ourselves in this scenario, what should we do about it? The most effective response to this multi-layered persistent uncertainty is not to seek impossible stability, but to cultivate radical adaptability and radical optionality. Give up on having a reliable prediction of what happens next. Instead cultivate multiple scenarios of what could happen, and endeavor with each of them to maximize your options. Goals should be considered as disposable hypotheses, constantly ready to be discarded and replaced by better-fitting concepts later on. You will be dead wrong on 19 out of your 20 expectations, but at least one of them will allow you to proceed. Make your decisions not on whether they are “right” but on whether they tend to give you more options later.

Maybe I suffer from software brain, but I think that eventually this will include everything. It might take more than a couple of haircuts but I think humanity will shave that head eventually.

Any business process that looks like code talking to a database in a repetitive way is up for grabs. That’s why Anthropic has been so relentlessly focused on enterprise customers, and it’s why OpenAI is now pivoting to business use. There’s real value in introducing AI to business, because so much of modern business is already software: collecting data, analyzing it, and taking action on it over and over again in a loop. Businesses also control their data, and they can demand that all their databases work together.

GPT-5.5 shows us that the models keep getting smarter, the apps keep getting more capable, and the harnesses keep getting better, making them ever more effective at solving real problems. I can get a near PhD-quality paper from four prompts or a playable roleplaying game, illustrated and “playtested,” from one. But the fiction is still flat and the hypotheses are sometimes uninteresting even when the statistics are sound. But still. A year ago, none of this was close, and, with the latest releases, capability gains appear to be accelerating.

The whiteboard just checks if a person can write code by hand, without any helpers and under pressure. Today, this is not the job that an engineer does or should do. Now an engineer has to make decisions at the product level and communicate with the team at different levels. But the whiteboard only checks a specific result, in fake conditions. Code overall is already a result. What matters is thinking.

Code remains cheap, unless it needs to be secure. Even if costs go down as inference optimizations, unless models reach the point of diminishing security returns, you still need to buy more tokens than attackers do. The cost is fixed by the market value of an exploit.

AI-enabled cyber attacks were up 89 percent in 2025 compared with a year earlier, according to data from security group CrowdStrike. Meanwhile, the average time between an attacker first gaining access to a system and acting maliciously fell to 29 minutes last year, a 65 percent acceleration from 2024.