Just a reminder that deepseek v3 came out 18 months ago and was considered revolutionary at the time but is basically unusable today
There was a fierce debate at the time about vibe coding and the argument was that LLMs can never create anything new because they are limited by their training data
Those engineers were partly right and vibe coding was a real nightmare, I cannot believe what we used to put ourselves through with Sonnet 3.5, but we also knew real new things could be made and that the detractors were wrong
I guess us non-engineers saw it most clearly (I would like to think so at least) because we were astonished at the new things we could do without the programming background, and we had nothing to lose and everything to gain in our enthusiasm
Then came Opus 4.5 earlier this year which changed everything
Suddenly real production code became possible with so much less friction and headache
Everyone complained endlessly about models being nerfed or quantized but there was a steady march of progress from 4.5 to 4.8
Now a completely new crop of models is coming out that is not quite a 4.5 moment but something close
We are not only getting more polish but things are becoming a little freaky, entire isolated domains become possible to combine with small teams or even just one person into new applications that would have required large infusions of time and capital in the past
My wife back in 2021 told me about AI but I was in healthcare, I thought she was being a little nutty, and she talked like something from a science fiction film was coming and she got involved in it early on
She never stops letting me know that she was right, and she was
The next year is going to be wild, the world is truly going to change over the next few years, the scale of disruption will be a combination of astonishing and awesome, but also catastrophic
There are many amazing things ahead and extraordinary challenges and opportunities
We are living inside one of one of the biggest revolutions in human history