From: fedora@fea.st   
      
   On Wed, 18 Feb 2026 13:52:55 -0500, Wilson    
   wrote:   
      
   >By Matt Shumer • Feb 9, 2026   
   >   
   >Think back to February 2020. If you were paying close attention, you   
   >might have noticed a few people talking about a virus spreading   
   >overseas. But most of us weren't paying close attention. The stock   
   >market was doing great, your kids were in school, you were going to   
   >restaurants and shaking hands and planning trips. If someone told you   
   >they were stockpiling toilet paper you would have thought they'd been   
   >spending too much time on a weird corner of the internet. Then, over the   
   >course of about three weeks, the entire world changed. Your office   
   >closed, your kids came home, and life rearranged itself into something   
   >you wouldn't have believed if you'd described it to yourself a month   
   >earlier.   
   >   
   >I think we're in the "this seems overblown" phase of something much,   
   >much bigger than Covid.   
      
   Right, it happened before so be perpetually afraid.  Surely it will   
   happen again, sometime, but none of us, zero, zilch know when it will   
   happen again or why.   
      
   >I've spent six years building an AI startup and investing in the space.   
   >I live in this world. And I'm writing this for the people in my life who   
   >don't... my family, my friends, the people I care about who keep asking   
   >me "so what's the deal with AI?" and getting an answer that doesn't do   
   >justice to what's actually happening. I keep giving them the polite   
   >version. The cocktail-party version. Because the honest version sounds   
   >like I've lost my mind. And for a while, I told myself that was a good   
   >enough reason to keep what's truly happening to myself. But the gap   
   >between what I've been saying and what is actually happening has gotten   
   >far too big. The people I care about deserve to hear what is coming,   
   >even if it sounds crazy.   
   >   
   >I should be clear about something up front: even though I work in AI, I   
   >have almost no influence over what's about to happen, and neither does   
   >the vast majority of the industry. The future is being shaped by a   
   >remarkably small number of people: a few hundred researchers at a   
   >handful of companies... OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and a few   
   >others. A single training run, managed by a small team over a few   
   >months, can produce an AI system that shifts the entire trajectory of   
   >the technology. Most of us who work in AI are building on top of   
   >foundations we didn't lay. We're watching this unfold the same as you...   
   >we just happen to be close enough to feel the ground shake first.   
   >   
   >   
   >For years, AI had been improving steadily. Big jumps here and there, but   
   >each big jump was spaced out enough that you could absorb them as they   
   >came. Then in 2025, new techniques for building these models unlocked a   
   >much faster pace of progress. And then it got even faster. And then   
   >faster again. Each new model wasn't just better than the last... it was   
   >better by a wider margin, and the time between new model releases was   
   >shorter. I was using AI more and more, going back and forth with it less   
   >and less, watching it handle things I used to think required my expertise.   
   >   
   >Then, on February 5th, two major AI labs released new models on the same   
   >day: GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI, and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic (the makers   
   >of Claude, one of the main competitors to ChatGPT). And something   
   >clicked. Not like a light switch... more like the moment you realize the   
   >water has been rising around you and is now at your chest.   
   >   
   >I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I   
   >describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just... appears.   
   >Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what   
   >I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find   
   >the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself,   
   >with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and   
   >forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the   
   >outcome and leave.   
   >   
   >Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually   
   >looks like in practice. I'll tell the AI: "I want to build this app.   
   >Here's what it should do, here's roughly what it should look like.   
   >Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it." And it does. It writes   
   >tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that   
   >would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It   
   >clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the   
   >way a person would. If it doesn't like how something looks or feels, it   
   >goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer   
   >would, fixing and refining until it's satisfied. Only once it has   
   >decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say:   
   >"It's ready for you to test." And when I test it, it's usually perfect.   
   >   
   >I'm not exaggerating. That is what my Monday looked like this week.   
   >   
   >But it was the model that was released last week (GPT-5.3 Codex) that   
   >shook me the most. It wasn't just executing my instructions. It was   
   >making intelligent decisions. It had something that felt, for the first   
   >time, like judgment. Like taste. The inexplicable sense of knowing what   
   >the right call is that people always said AI would never have. This   
   >model has it, or something close enough that the distinction is starting   
   >not to matter.   
   >   
   >I've always been early to adopt AI tools. But the last few months have   
   >shocked me. These new AI models aren't incremental improvements. This is   
   >a different thing entirely.   
   >   
   >And here's why this matters to you, even if you don't work in tech.   
   >   
   >The AI labs made a deliberate choice. They focused on making AI great at   
   >writing code first... because building AI requires a lot of code. If AI   
   >can write that code, it can help build the next version of itself. A   
   >smarter version, which writes better code, which builds an even smarter   
   >version. Making AI great at coding was the strategy that unlocks   
   >everything else. That's why they did it first. My job started changing   
   >before yours not because they were targeting software engineers... it   
   >was just a side effect of where they chose to aim first.   
   >   
   >They've now done it. And they're moving on to everything else.   
   >   
   >The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of   
   >watching AI go from "helpful tool" to "does my job better than I do", is   
   >the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine,   
   >accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not   
   >in ten years. The people building these systems say one to five years.   
   >Some say less. And given what I've seen in just the last couple of   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)