2026 has been the most pivotal year in my career… and it's only March

Chris Wellons · 29 Mar 2026 · nullprogram.com ↗

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Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
There is a large and growing gap between open-weight AI models and frontier AI models.

Their wordsThere's a huge, growing gap between open weight models and the frontier. Models you can run yourself are toys.
Our reading
Frontier AI now outperforms most human programmers at most programming tasks, with very low defect rates.

Their wordsAI is now highly skilled at programming, and better than me at almost every programming task, with inhumanly-low defect rates.
Our reading
AI will make hand-written code a luxury only the wealthy can afford to produce.

Their wordsAI makes programming so cheap that only the rich will write code by hand.