November Inflection
1 May 2026
November 2025 marked an important point in the development of AI-assisted programming. In that month Anthropic released Opus 4.5 and OpenAI released GPT-5.2. The former in particular, coupled with the Claude Code harness, represented a key moment for using AI.
one of those moments where the models get incrementally better in a way that tips across an invisible capability line where suddenly a whole bunch of much harder coding problems open up
Sometime in late 2025, I wrote my final lines of code. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but that day marked a transition after almost four decades of programming. I’ve created and shipped plenty of code since then, but with one key difference: that code wasn’t written by hand. It was written by AI agents that I directed.
The change was reinforced by the Christmas break. For a couple of weeks people who were too busy with their day job to play with AI had the opportunity to try out these new models.