September 15, 2026—The year that AI became useful (ai)
Sometime this year I noticed that the frontier AI models started being better at software development than me in a couple of significant ways.
A year or two ago one of my coworkers would joke that the AI models were no better than very mediocre interns. That was true. You’d ask an AI to identify the root cause of a bug in our codebase of 17k files, and you would usually get useless info. It wasn’t worth the time required to ferret out the good leads because you’d have to spend so much time reading and ruling out all the bad leads that were especially bad because they sounded plausible.
But the frontier models are now much better.
They don’t get distracted by distasteful architectural decisions, like I do. These machines are able to quickly wade through mountains of information, find the needle in the haystack, and pop out with answers that don’t just sound plausible… the answers stand up to reason and independent verification.
And so I find myself leaning more and more on AI to do my job.
“Hey Claude, here is all the software and firmware source code, all the schematics and part prints, all the notes and records we have, and copies of conversations I’ve had with certain key people, and data dumps from a few affected instruments. Please identify and rank possible software contributions to this issue we’re having in the field.”
And presto! I suddenly know (A) about a half dozen possible vectors in addition to the ones I already knew, and (B) exactly how severe each one is, which would have taken me ages to discover.
From here I can’t help pondering two things.
First, the world of machine automation feels poised to automate the Automaters out of their own jobs. I think the irony is funny in a tragic way. Where are things headed for me?
Second, people’s mocking tone of yesteryear has diminished, but I haven’t yet noticed anyone express its opposite. I don’t really know exactly what the opposite of mocking ought to be, but surely it isn’t silence. Or maybe I just haven’t been listening. Or maybe everyone is only halfway and next year people will begin to give great respect and honor to these machines. Where are things headed for the world?