Something Big Is Happening: a Response

A response to to a viral essay - agreeing with the urgency, adding precision about what these systems are and what they are not. TL;DR at bottom. I. Yes, Something Big Is Happening Matt Shumer's intriguing article " Something Big Is Happening " thought-provokingly captures something that many of us who work with AI daily rarely articulate: paid-tier "AI" models in early 2026 are qualitatively different from those of eighteen months ago; and the gap between what they can do and what is commonly thought they can do is wide and still widening. In the short period of generative and agentic tools, coding workflows have been absolutely transformed. The Software-as-a-Service industry has been turned on its head. Legal, financial, analytical and programming tasks that once took hours or even days now take minutes. Anyone who dismissed these tools after a brief encounter with free-tier ChatGPT in 2023 owes it to themselves to look again, because they'll find capability overwhelmingly stronger t