Programming with AI agents

`0:03:31`

There is none of the existential threat. That doesn't exist for me as an emotional component. It is only there as an intellectual component, and the emotional component for me is 100% pure, unadulterated joy-... and optimism and amazement that we've made computers do this. And I find it so interesting that we talked just 13 months ago because it's like we talked in different universes, different eras. I love this quote. I think it's Lenin. There are decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen. And we have seen decades of progress happen in the last nine months. I mean, imagine you're there when the Wright brothers take flight. Yesterday, the New York Times would write, "It's gonna be 10,000 years before we fly," and then the day after, we're up in the skies, and just a few years after that, there were cross-Atlantic planes. The whole world has completely changed. What a blessing to be there in that moment. If you zoom out and look at all of human history, how many humans got to live within the same epoch that they were born in? They never saw that complete change of the world and of society. And to have been blessed with two of those feels just such a privilege. I got to see the internet-... from pre-internet to post-internet, and then now pre-AI, post-AI. What an amazing run. How fortunate.

`0:05:54`

To me, that's why even when I look back upon our conversation a year ago, I don't actually have different opinions. I have the same opinions. A year ago, I did not like the mode of AI we were offered. It was the autocomplete mode, or it was the AI chatbot mode. Now, the chatbot I actually liked, as we talked about. Great tutor right from the get-go, great way of looking things up on the internet, not what was gonna replace me chiseling code. But-... then we get the agents. And the agents start out being curiosities for about five minutes, and then they get amazing, and then they get, "Oh my God, is this AGI?" And all of that happened since last year, even just within the last nine months. We have basically these few phases here. We have AI in the pre-agentic era. I was excited about that, but it was not fundamentally rewriting the rules of the game for me. It was not completely changing how I worked. I was still chiseling code, I just had a little helper, a little sidekick-... who could bounce ideas off, and I could look up this information online and so forth in a more efficient way. It was just a more efficient way to do what I was already doing, and it didn't change the emotional connection I had to the computer. Then we get to November 24th, 2025. Opus 4.5, to me, was the dividing line, where suddenly... I didn't even try it on the 24th. I think I tried it on the 26th.

I give it a couple of tasks, and I realize that the quality of the output is uncannily close to what I would've written. And I remember just leaning back and thinking, "What just happened?" "How did we go from this autocomplete mess that I was talking to you about in the summer to this just a few short months later? How did we get both the increase in intelligence and then also the increase in usability?" This agent harness question where I don't know if Opus 4.5 was that much smarter than Opus 4, which is what we had in the summer, but its ability to instrument your computer, to use tools, to check its own work, to apply its intelligence in such a way that you could get real meaningful work out of it, was completely different. And I think this is then the big change that happens for almost anyone who paid attention and started playing with it over the Christmas break. This is what I heard-... from Shopify and other places with lots of employees who suddenly had a breather, suddenly had a couple of weeks to lean back and just look at what was going on, gave it a try, and had the same mind-blowing experience that these agents were of a different genre than what we had before. And then what we get to is, I'm already excited at this point. Like, by December, I'm already revisiting sort of all my priors-... and going like, "Wow, if it can do this, can it also do that?" "Oh, yeah, it can." And again, Opus 4.5 now looks like a retarded model.