Ben Damman

Historians will note that 2026 marked the year 1 AE — the first full year of the Agentic Era. Those of us alive to witness it mostly used it to have AI fix our TypeScript errors.

If people are good at one thing, it’s at losing the point

@bcherny I wasn’t sure whether the epoch should be marked by the first release of Claude Code or something closer to summer or fall of 2025. I mean 0 AE.

Historians will note that 2026 marked the year 1 AE — the first full year of the Agentic Era. Those of us alive to witness it mostly used it to have AI fix our TypeScript errors.

Alibaba burned 10 billion tokens testing 18 AI models across 100 real codebases over 233 days each. The headline going viral: 75% of models break previously working code. The actual story: someone finally built the scoreboard that matters. Every AI coding benchmark until now asked: “Can it fix this bug right now?” SWE-CI tracks 71 consecutive commits across 233 days and asks: “Does it still work after 8 months of real evolution?” Most models scored a zero-regression rate below 25%. Three out of four maintenance cycles, the agent fixes today’s ticket and breaks yesterday’s feature. That gap is the snapshot, not the verdict. Nadella says 30% of Microsoft’s repos are AI-generated. Pichai claims the same for Google. Zuckerberg wants AI writing half of Meta’s code within the year. The code is shipping. The question was never whether AI would write production software. The question was when someone would start measuring the right thing. Gartner forecasts global IT spending above $6 trillion in 2026. Maintenance eats 60-70% of that. Roughly $4 trillion a year spent keeping existing code alive. Every AI coding tool today is optimized for the $2 trillion creation side. The $4 trillion maintenance side just got its first real benchmark. The models will close this gap. That’s the entire point of measuring it. Once you score maintenance, every lab starts training for maintenance. The same pattern played out with SWE-bench: models went from 3% to 70%+ in under two years once there was a leaderboard to chase. SWE-CI is the starting gun, not the funeral. The company that cracks long-term code stability owns the largest budget line in every engineering org on the planet. And that gap is only getting wider until someone does.

There are only two types of organizations in the world: 1) software companies 2) companies that haven’t yet realized they are software companies

We just shipped Distributed Python on top of the Erlang distribution, with full Elixir and Livebook integration: dashbit.co/blog/distribut… And much more: intellisense, zero-copy Apache Arrow, and more. Read the article for all the details. A huge thank you to NLnet Foundation for sponsoring our work. They are always looking for new ideas and you have until April 1st to join the next batch: nlnet.nl

"exponentials feel like nothing for a very long time and then feel like everything all at once"

🚨 DAVID SACKS: “Anthropic has a job listing for a software engineer on their website right now for $570,000 … So what Anthropic is saying is they're still trying to hire software engineers, at a very high wage, but somehow they think these jobs are going to be eliminated.”

past month ai coding companies keep putting out pieces on how they're working on radical products for the future of software means everyone is deeply lost at the moment

I dunno man seems like wars are super easy when the objective is to win and not launder a trillion dollars to your friends in the DC-VA-MD area for decades

@MontanaHighTech Um, big skynet, you say?

Join a thriving community of AI enthusiasts & professionals through Bigskynet. With meetings every Tuesday from 11 - 12 p.m. MST in #Billings (and virtually), Bigskynet provides tools, resources, and community features to accelerate your AI journey. bit.ly/4rfvTVK

@josevalim DeltaDB or what? @zeddotdev

Founder of offensive security firm: "I pointed Claude Opus 4.6 at OpenSSL. $6.01 in spent tokens. 8 min of crunch time. 4 new undisclosed CVES in OpenSSL."

Great book. A must-read for anyone on a Unix-like system.

From the xAI all-hands (just released publicly, uncut): Guodong Zhang: "I can already feel the AGI, at least for coding." He told kernel and compiler engineers to seriously ask whether it's still worth it, or whether it's time to join the effort and automate yourself. "What a year to be alive." Elon Musk: by end of year, AI won't even write code. It'll generate optimized binaries directly. Bypassing compilers. Bypassing coding entirely. "Just say 'create optimized binary for this particular outcome.' That intermediate step will not be needed." Grok Code expected to be state-of-the-art in 2 to 3 months. This is an internal all-hands they published raw.

@zeddotdev Where’s DeltaDB? Or should we all just use Checkpoints by @entire?

same title: "Senior Elixir Developer", same remote work. US: $163k median Southern Europe: ~$55k that's not a pay gap, that's a totally different sport 216 jobs, 44 salary data points, link to full breakdown below 👇

I'm flying to San Francisco today to attend the Pragmatic Summit. If you're around, say hello. 😀 h/t to @statsig @GergelyOrosz

Regional Security Officers (RSO) are Diplomatic Security Special Agents who keep Americans overseas safe. U.S. Embassy Maseru’s RSO Monica Schneider traveled throughout Lesotho to meet with district leaders, security services, and law enforcement. By strengthening relationships, the United States and Lesotho continue to build on 60 years of diplomatic relations. Strengthening bonds to keep our nations safe, fight transnational crime, and counter illegal immigration. #DiplomaticSecurityService #USinLesotho