"90% of 50 years of coding was grunt work AI now does 10,000x faster" — spark debate

typesfaster · x · 2026-10-17

typesfaster argues that roughly 90% of all coding work over the last 50 years was essentially effort a machine could now do in 1/10,000th the time, and is surprised more engineers aren't having an existential crisis about it.

The take drew pushback: gerardsans countered that AI is compression and can't create new information from nothing — the discovery and experimentation of the past can't simply be skipped.

Related event: Debate Erupts: Is AI Just Compression, and Can It Create New Information?(4 posts)→

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