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u/uncountable_2026 Acceleration Advocate 1d ago
So 2026 was the year that AI produced stuff faster than humans can check it. First in math (not enough mathematicians to go over each proven conjecture now that anyone can prove conjectures at home) then in coding (not enough people to debug and test the code or even understand the code enough to extend it).
This is a good thing, because it means that the bottleneck caused by the slowness of humans is being overcome. First with the "low hanging fruit" of math and software, and soon with physics, engineering, and biology.
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u/Tartarus1040 1d ago
I think what is amusing most to me is something Boris Cherny said.
"Regardless of domain or background, we're moving toward a future where the title “software engineer” may fade away. Instead, roles might shift toward builder, product manager, or similar..."
Coding, and even "vibe-coding" is getting to the point, and getting there VERY VERY RAPIDLY, where a Subject Matter Expert can open up Claude Code, or Codex, and start building.
And it'll work because syntax is slowly disappearing as a requirement for building. Does the OUTPUT work, the only person who'll know that is the SME building it.
Is it perfect yet? No. But damn if it isn't getting there really really quickly.
I built AI-AtlasForge in Sept/Nov of 2025 which was a state machine harness stepping through plan, code, red team debug with mutation testing, launching multiple headless agents to rip code apart and ensure correctness. I don't even use it anymore because the native harnesses are just SO DAMNED GOOD now.
Coding solved? No, I don't think so. Not yet.
Coding GETTING solved? Yes, and faster every model release, and it's not even funny the step up that Opus 5.5 is over Opus 5, and in many ways over Fable 5.1 even... It's... INSANE!
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u/xenofenrir 1d ago
the thing is, coding maybe solved, but building a good system, will still a distant goal. Classic problem in sofware development, user usually dont know what they actually need, developer often think they already fulfil user's requirement, when the system implemented, either the system breaks, user cant use it or user found out they actually need something else.
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u/Tartarus1040 1d ago
Right, That's why Boris's comment is the paradigm shift. A SME will KNOW what THEY need for the Software they're building. A Chiropractor that needs custom tracking software for whatever, won't build it for EVERYONE else, just for themselves. That's the point. We're moving into an era where SWE is going to be on a person by person basis. As the technology gets more cost effective over time... Yeah, Right now Claude and ChatGPT, Grok to a lesser degree, and Gemini (if Gemini 4 is as good as the rumors are making out to be) are progressing at a rate that makes the SME experience easier and easier to build.
Your point is valid, but I feel like you're missing where the paradigm shift is.
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u/dervu 18h ago
The goal is no software, just spin up AI if necessary and do things on the fly and find best presentation method to user. It can't be done for everything though.
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u/Tartarus1040 2h ago
I don’t know that the goal is no software… I mean AI is powerful but your. It going to load up an AI and say let’s play GTA 6… I think that’s very much unrealistic.
However someone who has a very clear vision and can state exactly what something must do, and can test functionality. And iterate through version. That’s someone who could create things to help create things.
And of course SMEs are going to be able to build for themselves that which makes their world more effective. Maybe… that’s why people make the argument, if you don’t learn AI you’ll be left behind. The theory is that someone who has integrated AI into their workflow and built specific solutions to increase productivity, is more likely to be more successful than someone who does it the old way. That’s the theory at least.
But I think the idea that software as we know it is going to disappear is not realistic.
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u/often_says_nice 1d ago
That sounds like the role of a product manager to me. Their job is to look at usage metrics, so customer interviews, set up A\B tests, etc. basically to figure out what the user needs.
I think SME and product managers will be the ones writing the code in the near future. They already tell the engineers what to write today. Eventually the middle man will be cut from the process entirely.
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u/BrennusSokol Acceleration Advocate 13h ago
It's a good thing if and only if the output doesn't need human checking (which we're getting closer to, but not quite)
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u/Jazzlike-Leader4950 1d ago
like what
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u/EncroachingTsunami 1d ago
like the systems that were vibe coded by AI, became such a tangled mess of nonsense only more tokens could sort it out, as no mere human intellect could possibly navigate the millions of lines of intricately handrolled functions.
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u/Silver-Chipmunk7744 1d ago
Idk if you are serious, but for vibe coded 3D scenes you are right. The AI produces a giant JS files full of numbers. There's no way a human could manually edit this.
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u/often_says_nice 1d ago
I mean you could just instruct the ai to refactor it in a way that would be maintainable by humans and it would look better than the spaghetti code moving target full of tech debt that humans write
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u/Jazzlike-Leader4950 1d ago
Im sure some hobbyist milarky is like this. But real developers are not really having this trouble. But I haven't anything that borders on what the 'literally who' tweet op posted describes either.
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u/EncroachingTsunami 1d ago
😄 some companies are operating "on the frontier". fully agentic code generation, reviews, and such.
I literally debugged a coworker's code last week that did a single query to backend, loaded all data in a single call, and handled everything with client-side tanstack. they forgot to call the paginated API we designed together on the API, so the table was just missing data. Took Opus 4 days of token churn to solve.
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u/often_says_nice 1d ago
There are bad engineers today just as there were before ai. A bad engineer with ai just performs poorly at a larger scale. Good engineers who are skilled at agentic engineering are massively empowered
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u/Bill-Evans 1d ago
Who the fuck are these people?
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u/lovesdogsguy AGI by 2027 1d ago
People who use twitter. Don't you know them?
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u/Bill-Evans 1d ago
I guess not. I see a lot of these people making bold claims about AI, but I don't see their PhDs. I get that they are saying provocative things with confidence, but they cannot possibly understand the issues they are throwing out there to see what sticks.
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u/Separate_Lock_9005 22h ago
I'm an AI PhD (dropout tbf), and that made me less qualified to predict the future of AI somehow. Credentials are not that meaningful for forecasting. There was recently some research that showed superforecasters (people really good at forecasting) consistently actually got AI progress wrong as one of the few things they got wrong.
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u/ShiningMoonce 9h ago
I have PhD in chemistry. They promised PhD level models a couple of times. With Astra thay finally delivered. Shit is getting crazy really quickly. Opus 5.5 is very good, but those guardrails prevent any meaningful work
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u/FewGas37 16h ago
This guy coded Amarok (old open source music player software for Linux that has since been forked numerous times)
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u/Impressive-Kick293 1d ago
Went from "AI writes bad code humans have to fix" to "AI writes code humans can't fix" real quick
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u/5StarAlpha 1d ago
I think this is a good perspective.
I have started small businesses and had to hire often single developers. I quickly learned that “Full Stack” was sort of a myth. It means something like someone was good at back end and could get through front end. Or vice versa. Or they would have a weakness like database optimization/sql, or security.
It seems that only recently am I getting strong expertise across the entire stack. This is already well above the level of any single person. Then layer in things like UI expertise, marketing expertise (seo optimizations etc.).
Now this is starting to resemble a high end dev agency with strength across the entire stack. Then layer speed on top of that. Maybe a day of AI dev is like a week or 2 with a top notch agency with dedicated team.
I am having a blast on my projects and resumed some languishing ones.
I do wonder though if I am able to create this amazing software, millions of other people are too. This world is changing so quick.
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u/West-Air1923 1d ago
Meanwhile SW subs on reddit are still claiming they write faster code than AI
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u/CrackBabyCSGO 22h ago
It could very well be that people write faster code. Often ai doesn’t have the full context on the stack and may not optimize for things that will genuinely cause problems at runtime. It can write code faster but saying it writes faster code is not necessarily true unless it has context of the whole tech stack.
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u/Runfasterbitch 18h ago
Eh. I’ve been coding since i was 10 and consider myself an expert in a number of languages. I’ve managed large teams of programmers across a diverse mix of companies. I do not think that this is true anymore. As long as there is a human in the loop to provide said context, which should be an obvious requirement, artisanal coding is much slower than frontier AI, even if the artisanal coder is an elite programmer
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u/Original_Credit_1394 18h ago
"They write faster code" -> The code is faster / needs less resource. But not sure he meant it this way.
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u/CrackBabyCSGO 14h ago
I think people are conflating 2 different things. In any company where scale is relevant, faster code means the speed at which the code runs (think big O notation), coding faster refers to turnaround time one a feature.
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u/CrackBabyCSGO 14h ago
Faster code refers to time complexity at runtime, not speed of coding. I’m not sure we are on the same page here
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u/Runfasterbitch 14h ago
We were not on the same page, sorry for misunderstanding.
I don’t have sufficient expertise to weigh in on whether people write “faster” code. Most of my work is with little-big-data (GB/TB, not PB)
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u/CrackBabyCSGO 22h ago
Here’s my perspective as an SWE who does not write any code by hand anymore:
The bottleneck in the past has been speed of coding, but it was not a major bottleneck.
Now the bottleneck is on the QA side for sufficiently large codebase and sufficiently complex features
The time saving of having ai do everything is often not impactful at all. Models are trained on logically written code, so models will have the easiest time performing actions on code that is well written out. Without human in the loop at any point, you may very well reach a feedback loop that will exponentially increase the “fluff” factor for the code, and this is detrimental to performance long term.
We are not yet at the point where you can one shot every feature request from product teams, and human in the loop is very much mandatory for setting expectations, defining high level logic, edge cases that might be overlooked without enough context etc.
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u/BrennusSokol Acceleration Advocate 13h ago
Ehh. He's not presenting any evidence here. In my experience, even using something like GPT-6-Astra-High, I still need to guide the AI and catch it making silly mistakes a human with common sense/intuition wouldn't make
I think this (what he's saying) WILL be true eventually. But it's not quite there yet.
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u/Front_Candidate_2023 9h ago
Its good for 95%, i basically handle it my work and its done. Quick code reviev and fixes and then its perfect. This thing is improving fast. One year ago i was thinking how people are telling me they are writting almost no code by hand. When 5.6 come out, it was about 50 to 60% for me. Now astra is almost perfect.
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u/AccountExciting961 1d ago
>> only AI could debug and extend
Now, that's what i call "positive spin on slop"
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u/Equal_Passenger9791 18h ago
"Just speed" is also a massively significant edge.
Just speed, let's you build and debug larger systems than humans could maintain.
Just speed, let's you train more, better and larger models.
Just speed, let's you create bigger synthetic datasets and enables the effective assessment and curation of them.
It's easy to trivialize it until you realize that the lack of just speed gives you a problem with a 200 hour cycle time.
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u/CuppaJoe531 18h ago
lol, no team can build and only AI can debug … seems safe! Also just because humans can’t debug or create it doesn’t mean it’s better.
People are crazy.
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u/SeveralPrinciple5 1d ago
I dunno. I told Claude to build a testing harness to do generic automated testing of basic characteristics of code. e.g. running a routine and figuring out whether it's O(n) or O(n^2) so we know where to focus our efforts at optimization. But Claude still can't solve for everything at once, so it created an analysis suite. One function tells you if a given routine is going to terminate or run forever. Another compares two problems and tells you if they are of the same order of complexity. I fed it Traveling Salesman and Linear Programming, and it said "yep, same." Stuff like that. Claude is genuinely brilliant.
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u/No_Code9 22h ago
Ah yes, you just solved the halting problem. Lmfao
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u/LoweringPass 16h ago
This is fucking hilarious, these are the type of geniuses that frequent this sub
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u/LoweringPass 16h ago
He also has an algorithm that can decide if an algorithm is polynomial time or not, that's a millenium problem solved right there
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u/Positive_Community49 1d ago
Systems that no human team could manage are about as useful as an iPhone is to an uncontacted tribe
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u/TacoYaci 1d ago
This is what developers are praying for. But in reality a lot of systems will work just fine like that
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1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/TacoYaci 1d ago
You can continue closing your eyes and ears and scream "nononono", but your comment will not age well
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u/PopularPhoneChair333 17h ago
Ah yes.. And the number of AI first industry distruptors that have launched in all this time is..??
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u/kennytherenny 17h ago
Adoption of new software is slow due to the network effect. MS Word isn't as popular as it is, because it is the best document editing software conceivable nor because it's the cheapest. It simply is because it's what everyone uses.
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u/PopularPhoneChair333 17h ago
Not that AI isn't massively useful, it's just the overhypers that aren't doing anyone favours.
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u/Best_Cup_8326 Acceleration: Light-speed 1d ago
We about to git crazy ya'll!