XKCD 1319: we now live on the theory curve

For most of my career, XKCD 1319 has (like many XKCDs) felt funny but uncomfortably close to the truth. But now 6 months after the November 2025 inflection point Claude and friends have fundamentally changed this sort of thing. I'm now regularly writing scripts that run first time, then evaporate, then I go back to what I was actually doing. We now live on the theory curve. I ran a web search to check if anyone had got there first. Of course they had. A Hacker News commenter made exactly the point last August, complete with the gleeful framing "productivity gains built from productivity gains." Ah well, nothing new under the sun. The cost-benefit arithmetic of automation, the thing XKCD 1319 mocked, is load-bearing in how developers think about their own time. If that arithmetic has genuinely changed, it's a lot of mental machinery to retire.[^caveat] [^caveat]: I am aware this is exactly what someone says before discovering they were on the reality curve all along. We'll see.