Amen. Fullly agree with what Deam Ball is saying.

I agree with all this; it is why I also believe that opus 4.5 in claude code is basically AGI.

Most people barely noticed, but *it is happening.*

It’s just happening, at first, in a conceptually weird way: Anyone can now, with quite high reliability and reasonable assurances of quality, cause bespoke software engineering to occur.

This is a strange concept. Most people, going about their day, do not think about how “causing bespoke software engineering to occur” might improve their lives or allow them to achieve some objective. They think of “software engineering,” when they think of it at all, as something altogether distinct from what they do. Of course if you have deeply internalized the general-purpose nature of “software,” and especially, “things achievable by well-orchestrated computers,” you understand that in some important sense, almost all human endeavor can be aided, in some way or another, by software engineering. A great deal of it can be automated altogether.

Coding agents have reached the point of reliability and quality where it is now possible to cause a great many moderately complex software engineering projects to occur. I would not quite say “automate,” both because it is not in fact automatic (the human has to remain at least kind of engaged throughout the process; even “vibe coding” is a form of engagement) and because “automate” implies a “set it and forget it” mentality that is not at all consonant with what these coding agents require of their human users.

You have seen the threads on X with mind-exploding emojis. You have seen the LinkedIn-style “everyone is a software engineer now” content. You have perhaps seen thoughtful reflective essays on Substack and personal blogs. It has been talked about before incessantly, often in much too hype-y a manner. It has been talked about so much that you would not be mistaken to roll your eyes, because the predictions have not quite panned out. Even today, the methods I have gestured at in this essay do not work perfectly.

Yet it is happening nonetheless.

Yet it is happening nonetheless.

The potential is shockingly vast if you have conceptualized these tools appropriately (remember, for instance, that a large language model is itself a software tool, accessible through an application programming interface by your coding agents to accomplish all of the things a software engineer can use a large language model to accomplish).

It will take time to realize this potential, if for no other reason than the fact that for most people, the tool I am describing and the mentality required to wield it well are entirely alien. You have to learn to think a little bit like a software engineer; you have to know “the kinds of things software can do.” You have to learn also to think like the chief executive of a thousand small (but fast growing) teams of software engineers who possess expert-level knowledge of virtually all domains of human intellectual life. Grasping all of this, and learning how to embody it, requires humans to adopt a strange and new kind of agenticness. Not all of us will.

But some people understand it already, and their numbers will only grow. Young people in particular, blessed with neuroplasticity, will have internalized this to a depth few grownups will be able to comprehend. This transformation will therefore be sociological as well as technological, the revolution cultural as well as industrial.

We lack “transformative AI” only because it is hard to recognize transformation *while it is in its early stages.* But the transformation is underway. Technical and infrastructural advancements will make it easier to use and better able to learn new skills. It will, of course, get smarter.

Diffusion will proceed slower than you’d like but faster than you’d think. New institutions, built with AI-contingent assumptions from the ground up, will be born.

So don’t listen to the chatterers. Watch, instead, what is happening.

— Dean Ball