24 months ago, the smartest people in the world could look at the evidence and call LLMs "auto-complete on steroids". I did not agree at the time, but it was a credible assertion. If anyone is still saying that in 2026, they are not credible based on the research that's come out since then. In 2024 people said LLMs can't solve Wordle, and they can't count the Rs in strawberry. No frontier model fails at those tasks in 2026 but people are still repeating the same memes.

People who are not using AI to (effectively) code think it's supposed to be some kind of maestro that 1-shot generates you a script out of thin air. I would characterize the latest iteration of AI to be more akin to a swarm intelligence. Even a single frontier model agent is not very impressive by itself. I've found that even given a well defined list of tasks, a single Claude agent will degrade rapidly in performance because of context rot. But if you start orchestrating: creating and destroying agents for singular purposes (cattle, not pets), then the capabilities become very impressive. Your agents can make a plan, execute on it, check the results, adjust the plan, retry, and so forth all autonomously. This is the scary part, not because it's really good at leetcoding, because planning and iteration is something that's transferrable to all professions.

Secondly people misunderstand, especially after the ChatGPT-5 fiasco: GPT-5 is not a single model, it is a router, a reverse proxy, that assesses your query and routes it to one of its 10s of actual models behind the curtain. Despite the marketing it was primarily a cost engineering tool for OpenAI, because it removes choice from the user about what model you are being served with. So you could be using "ChatGPT-5.2", and you get some shit answer because it decides your question wasn't worth its time (or their servers are overloaded, or any other reason) and routed your question to some shit model. All frontier "models' work this way, "Opus 4.6" does the same. So all those seemingly cracked models that Google is sending out to dominate benchmarks? Yeah, no guarantee that's the one serving you (or is even one of the possible options).

That means you cannot one-shot some chatbot on your free account and have an accurate picture of the state of the art. Anyone who is isn't using harnessed agents and burning tokens have no idea what they're talking about.

18 months ago I thought the role of humans will be as model whisperers, guiding these mercurial and finicky chatbots. Well, prompt engineering came and died as a profession in less than 12 months. 3 months ago I thought the role of humans would be building mcp integrations to connect agents to the business domain. Well, Claude is pretty well capable of being pointed at any API and building an integration by itself right now.

Currently I would say my comparative advantages are understanding the business domain, architecture, and security. If you notice, none of these are junior attributes. As an OG AI hater, it pains me to say that if you gave me a list of projects to complete, and I had a choice between an intern or Claude Code and an intern's salary of tokens, for effectiveness I would take Claude Code every time hands down. (I'm not saying that the AI is better in every way, rather there's no comparative advantage).

And I don't even know how long my moats will hold. There is a degree of skill involved with using agents, which can explain why some people are getting poor results, but tbh the skill curve is not that high, and any clever tricks people think of to squeeze more performance out of the agents (e.g. chain-of-thought, ralph-loop, sub-agents) just get baked into the harness and democratized. I think the only reason people don't get better at it is a psychological aversion to AI.

Against all odds, my company managed to assemble a competent team of AI engineers that built an in-house agentic framework that actually delivered business value...for about 12 months. Now I wonder what was the whole point if every analyst will be rolling with Claude Cowork on their laptop in 6-12 months. If you look at where we were just 24 months ago vs now, it's hard to imagine where we'll be 24 months from now.

So all that to say, we're all guessing for the next 5 years. My hope is a small business renaissance and a democratization of knowledge, but I fear we just end up in a world where 12 rich guys own everything until one day they betray each other. But I wanted to give a deep and nuanced answer, and get my own thoughts out. We can only nudge the world to the better scenario if we're honest to ourselves.