19 min readJust now
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I spent a lot of time writing software with AI last year, and I had some pretty good successes, notably Beads and Gas Town. I wrote a whole bunch of other systems, some still in progress. And I got a solid intuition, a feel for how AI’s exponential progression is, well, progressing.
That intuition is how I created Gas Town. I believe the exponential curves; I believe everything Dario Amodei and Andrej Karpathy are saying about software. And if you were leaning in when Claude Code came out 11 months ago, then if you extrapolated from completions in 2023 to chat in 2024 to agents in early 2025, you arrived inescapably at orchestration arriving in early 2026.
So towards the end of the year, I went looking for what I knew would be there, and found Gas Town right where I was looking for it. I was like a geologist who knew there would be an oil deposit there, and I drilled and it hit. I dug around and found a shape that just barely worked, with the best late 2025’s models that hadn’t been trained to be factory workers, plus a lot of duct tape. And janky as it may be, Gas Town has illuminated and kicked off the next wave for everyone.
I think I’ve established a pretty good track record of predicting the future, from Death of the Junior Developer back in June 2024 when the job market was still super hot, to Revenge of the Junior Developer which predicted today’s orchestrators 10 months ago, to Gas Town itself, which I think is pushing pretty far into the frontiers of what’s possible today.
All of my predictive power comes from believing the curves. It’s that simple.
In this post, I’m going to make a prediction about which software will survive, if you believe Karpathy, in a world where AI writes all the software and is essentially infinitely capable. I think you can make a simple survival argument that comes down to selection pressure.
First let’s talk about my credentials and qualifications for this post. My next-door neighbor Marv has a fat squirrel that runs up to his sliding-glass door every morning, waiting to be fed. It’s against a city ordinance to feed them but Marv is 82 and he ain’t having it. So the squirrel has grown chonkulous, and it shows up like clockwork when we’re about to go golf or head to the range in his corvette or any of the other 82-year-old stuff we do.
Marv’s squirrel knows approximately the same amount about evolutionary biology as I do, and would score similarly to me on a University-level examination on the subject.
But I have this hunch. I think I know how to predict whether your software is going to make it or not, if you assume (as I do) that Karpathy and Amodei are completely 100% correct.
Let’s see if I can convince you.