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Reflections on AI-assisted Programming

Yihui Xie · 3 May 2026 · yihui.org

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Yihui Xie did not write this page.

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.

  1. Skill-wise, most software developers, as long as they are willing/able to pay for AI assistants, are on the same page now.
  2. Going forward, I think the future will be filled with software abundance, or, more accurately, I'd call it "software proliferation". That is, centralized development will be history. Software will be highly personalized, especially for open source software.
  3. We owe a debt, not to companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google, but to the authors of the free public raw materials that were used to train AI.