An AI state of the union: We’ve passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines | Simon Willison
Apr 2, 2026 · 1h 40m · YouTube
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asr · 20,515 words · docs
0:00A lot of people woke up in January and February and started realizing, oh wow, I can churn out 10,000 lines of code in a day.
0:06It used to be, you'd ask ChatGPT for some code and it would spit out some code, then you have to run it and test it.
0:11The coding agents, they take that step for you.
0:14The open question for me is: how many other knowledge work fields are actually prone to these agent loops?
0:19Now that we have this power, people almost underestimate what they can do with it.
0:22Today, probably 95% of the code that I produce, I didn't type it myself.
0:27I write so much of my code on my phone, it's wild.
0:30I can get good work done walking the dog along the beach.
0:33My New Year's resolution, every previous year, I've always told myself, this year I'm going to focus more, I'm going to take on less things.
0:39This year, my ambition was take on more stuff and be more ambitious.
0:43Such an interesting contradiction.
0:44AI is supposed to make us more productive.
0:46It feels like the people that are most AI-pilled are working harder than they've ever worked.
0:50Using coding agents well is taking every inch of my 25 years of experience as a software engineer.
0:55I can fire up four agents in parallel and have them work on four different problems.
0:59By 11 a.m., I am wiped out.
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