It's Already 2126
Sometime between November of 2025 and January of 2026, a century passed. It is not May of 2026. It is May of 2126.
I remember watching my children learn to ride a bicycle. For weeks on end they toiled away with no perceptible improvement, brave but dangerously clumsy and always one fleeting moment away from disaster. Then one day, something clicked…the balance, the inertia, what to do with the pedals. In literally a blink of an eye, their entire world changed. One second earlier they still couldn’t ride a bike. The next, their eyes lit up with confidence, as if they had ridden for years.
But the moment was bigger than it looked. The switch didn’t just give them a bike — it gave them every bike. The change was so large the unit of measurement changed. Yesterday they were limited by how many feet they could walk. Today they were only limited by how many miles they could ride.
I don’t profess to understand the underlying wizardry at Anthropic or OpenAI, but I feel something similar happened with AI between November and January.
As Andrej Karpathy and Boris Cherny (the creator of Claude Code) have famously written, just a year ago they were doing the majority of coding themselves. Then they were doing 80%, then 20%, then suddenly almost none at all.* The light bulb clicked, and like a child who suddenly understood how inertia keeps the bike from falling over, the machine could suddenly do “the thing,” all at once, and as if it had always known how. There was no slipping back to the version that couldn’t.
Here is what I feel is happening. Our perception of technological change is anchored by the iPhone decade. The amount of change possible from 2010 to 2011, 2011 to 2012, etc. is what one year of change feels like. One big annual release. The iPhone. Then a bigger iPhone called an “iPad” (which everyone questioned the purpose of and doubted would sell). Two cameras instead of one. Wait, no — three cameras! Bluetooth headphones that finally worked out of the box without a sacrificial offering ritual to pair them with the phone. The audible gasp when Steve Jobs slipped the MacBook Air out of a manila envelope. The anticipation of every keynote.
If that is what one year of technological change feels like, then between November and January, a hundred years of change happened.
I sometimes play this movie in my head. It’s a mix between the movie Inception, where Leonardo DiCaprio walks along a beach inside a dream, past cityscapes built from nothing but his imagination, remixed with a kids’ Speed Stacking competition. You have a thought, and — zip — the city is built. Found a bug? No problem. Just collapse it like the cup stack and — zoop — build an entirely new one. We went from most people arguing that code was impossible to solve, to taking for granted that machines can code; the only question now is how well.
We went to sleep one night and woke up like Rip Van Winkle. What is technologically possible is already 100 years in the future, but in the strangest twist, everyone we encountered was still living as if it were the past. You walk into any coffee shop outside of Silicon Valley and you see people adjusting little PowerPoint boxes with their mouse until the alignment is just right, replying to emails, or manually formatting spreadsheets like it was a historical re-enactment.
For the vast majority of people, it is 5 months into 2026, and life is basically the same as it was in 2025. But you are holding technology from 2126. The screen looks the same. What’s behind it is from another century.