I found this post from Tom Blomfield to be pretty profound. We’ve seen interest in universal basic income from Sam Altman and other leaders in AI, as they’ve anticipated the decimation of white collar jobs in coming years. Blomfield crushes the resistance from some corners of the software developer community in stark terms.
These tools [like Windsurf, Cursor and Claude Code] are now very good. You can drop a medium-sized codebase into Gemini 2.5's 1 million-token context window and it will identify and fix complex bugs. The architectural patterns that these coding tools implement (when prompted appropriately) will easily scale websites to millions of users. I tried to expose sensitive API keys in front-end code just to see what the tools would do, and they objected very vigorously.
They are not perfect yet. But there is a clear line of sight to them getting very good in the immediate future. Even if the underlying models stopped improving altogether, simply improving their tool use will massively increase the effectiveness and utility of these coding agents. They need better integration with test suites, browser use for QA, and server log tailing for debugging. Pretty soon, I expect to see tools that allow the LLMs to to step through the code and inspect variables at runtime, which should make debugging trivial.
At the same time, the underlying models are not going to stop improving. they will continue to get better, and these tools are just going to become more and more effective. My bet is that the AI coding agents quickly beat top 0.1% of human performance, at which point it wipes out the need for the vast majority software engineers.
He quotes the Y Combinator stat I cited in a previous post:
About a quarter of the recent YC batch wrote 95%+ of their code using AI. The companies in the most recent batch are the fastest-growing ever in the history of Y Combinator. This is not something we say every year. It is a real change in the last 24 months. Something is happening.
Companies like Cursor, Windsurf, and Lovable are getting to $100M+ revenue with astonishingly small teams. Similar things are starting to happen in law with Harvey and Legora. It is possible for teams of five engineers using cutting-edge tools to build products that previously took 50 engineers. And the communication overhead in these teams is dramatically lower, so they can stay nimble and fast-moving for much longer.
And for me, this is where the rubber meets the road:
The costs of running all kinds of businesses will come dramatically down as the expenditure on services like software engineers, lawyers, accountants, and auditors drops through the floor. Businesses with real moats (network effect, brand, data, regulation) will become dramatically more profitable. Businesses without moats will be cloned mercilessly by AI and a huge consumer surplus will be created.
Moats are now more important than ever. Non-tech companies—those that rely on tech companies to make software for them, specifically B2B vertical SaaS—are starting to hire developers. How soon will they discover Cursor if they haven’t already? These next few years will be incredibly interesting.
