Source: Washington Post
by Megan McArdle
“Covid-19 gave everyone a harsh lesson in the power of exponentials, and that memory haunts any analysis of artificial intelligence. Sure, everything looks fine — now. But then, everything also looked fine in early March 2020. By the end of the month, we were locked in our houses with our strategic reserves of toilet paper. In a viral essay on X this week, Otherside AI founder Matt Shumer draws the parallel explicitly. ‘I think we’re in the ‘this seems overblown’ phase of something much, much bigger than Covid,’ he writes, before launching into a description of what’s already here for coders: AI agents building ‘usually perfect’ software from a plain-English description. He’s predicting a world soon in which AI blows up software development and moves on to every other profession.” (02/13/26)