In 2025, there was a widely regarded inflection point in the software engineering professional community. Opus 4.5 was released on November 24. I remember being thrilled that when I asked it to implement something on my personal projects, the result was something that generally worked. Up to this point, it would take multiple iterations of prompting to get a working result (if one wasn’t writing any code themselves). Then, from December 25 - 31 in 2025, Anthropic gave Pro and Max users double the usage. I remember coming back to work in January feeling different about the role that AI would have in my daily work as a software engineer. Much of the commentary I saw online matched this sentiment. Over time Simon Willison, Martin Fowler, and Andrej Karpathy (among others) acknowledged the impact of this inflection point.
In October 2026, I believe we’re at another inflection point. If the aforementioned one convinced people that agents were capable of producing the work, this new point that we find ourselves at has more people than ever convinced that agents can or will have the ability to replace human software engineers. I’ve been conflicted and skeptical about this at least since GitHub Copilot was launched in 2022. While I don’t think that we can be sure about the future holds for profession and our employment in it, it sure seems like we’ve crossed a line with no chance of turning back.
I have been experimenting with large language models since 2022. For what felt like a long period of time, the people who had influenced my most in my career were silent or distant about the prospect of using AI to write code. Then, in the last 12 months, all of them have seemingly been converted to this new way of working.
DHH, the creator of Ruby on Rails, who, in my opinion, spoke most elegantly about the utility of aesthetic beauty of code acknowledged the November Inflection:
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 gave 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.
On September 23, In a sermonic talk emblematic of the entire point I’m making, DHH publicly declared his retirement from handwritten code.
In June 2025, “Uncle” Bob Martin, whose Clean Code left an indelible mark on my coding style , emphasized caution with AI tools. He began experimenting public with AI in January 2026. By April he wasn’t reviewing the code produced by his agents. He often tweeted about building custom harnesses for his agents to ensure acceptable code quality, but by September he abandoned that too.
Kent Beck, the creator of XP and popularizer of Test-Driven Development was relatively ahead of the curve. In April 2025, he spoke of “coding at 3AM for the first time in decades” due to his use AI.
Justin Searls, who I fondly remember on TDD, not to mention his personality test for programmers stated:
Over a year ago, I stopped reading code and started automating adversarial agents to perform recursive code reviews instead.
The result: low-defect systems that do what I want. Can’t believe anyone engaging seriously with these tools still believes human code review is superior
DHH, Kent Beck, Uncle Bob, Martin Fowler, and Justin Searls. In terms of people who write books and speak on software engineering, this is who I learned from. 3 of them were architects of the Agile Manifesto. They are all-in on AI now. While I’ve been experimenting with LLMs and code generation since GPT 3.5 and haven’t written basically any code by hand for the last 1.5+ years (!!), I think I now have to admit to myself that it’s time to be all-in.