“The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.”
Never has this quote been more true, nor more dystopian.
I’ve been hesitant to write what I’ve experienced over the past 45 days because it continues to evolve so quickly I fear anything I share will instantly become obsolete. But a post has gone viral on Twitter, spawning endless discussion, dissection, and even mockery. Yes, something big is happening. Let me be less bombastic, more direct, and help put this moment in context.
I’ve been writing and shipping software since 1997. Back then, you spent years programming something, and when you were done you had to burn physical CDs and mail them to your customers. When I joined Apple in 2006, they shipped software once per year.
I wrote code through the dot-com boom, through Web 2.0, through the mobile revolution, and through the cloud transition; none of those platform changes were as transformative as what I’ve seen over the past few months.
AI is compressing timelines and changing the nature of work in ways that break our intuitions.
Many point to November 20, 2022 - ChatGPT’s debut - as the dawn of the AI era. That’s fair; much of the world had previously never heard of AI nor understood its potential capabilities. It was the first time you could ask a computer to do something, in plain English, and it would do it. For many it replaced Google as their point of research, it gave them someone to talk to, it became a friend.
I’ve always focused more on productivity. The singular theme running through the 3 companies I’ve built is time-savings. I crave tools that let me do more, faster, and I love building those tools for others.
In that lens, it’s actually November 24, 2025 - Opus 4.5’s debut - that changed the world.
By mid-December, it was clear that this model was actually quite good. Disturbingly good. It wrote exceptional code, with relatively little guidance, and stayed productive even in very large, very complex codebases. That was a first.
By the holidays, I realized that software engineering, as the day-to-day work I had known it, had changed forever. The first week of January, we completely restructured our Digits code repositories for AI agent productivity. Today, just 6 weeks later, much of the code we ship is AI-written and human-reviewed. By this summer, I expect that 95% of software engineering - a field I have dedicated my entire life to - will be automated.
For me, it already is. I spent a few hours last night coding (as I have most evenings of my life since 6th grade), except now it’s different. I haven’t actually written code since December. Now I just write English. Actually, I don’t type anything at all, I just dictate English using Wispr, and Claude writes the code for me. I can now ship more software every day than I ever have in my life, but the thing I spent my entire life being good at? That’s now gone.
Software engineering is just the leading edge.
Another field I have come to know quite intimately - accounting - is also facing its watershed moment. The month-end financial close, the thing that every serious business pays accountants to do, will effectively be automated this year. The latest machine learning models make computers dramatically more accurate, and thousands of times faster, than any human bookkeeper. Even complex accounting (accrual schedules, revenue recognition, and painstaking review processes) will fall to AI before end of year.
To address the obvious, there will still be software engineers, and there will still be accountants. I see no signs of taste and judgment being replaced or delegated, nor will your AI agent accept liability or offer indemnity. But the day-to-day work of these professions has changed forever. We are all on this journey together.
How are these impacts experienced today? Completely unevenly. Most programmers will still spend every day of 2026 programming, just like they always have. Most accountants will spend every day this year doing the accounting. Except in pockets, where it’s the dawn of a whole new era, where agents do most of the work.
The future is here, and one day soon everyone will realize it. Slowly, and then all at once.