{
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  "description": "XKCD 1319 set the theory and reality curves of automation against each other. With LLMs writing the scripts, the theory curve has won.",
  "path": "/blog/2026/05/28/xkcd-1319-we-now-live-on-the-theory-curve",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-28T00:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:tevykrhi4kibtsipzci76d76/site.standard.publication/self",
  "tags": [
    "ai",
    "dev"
  ],
  "textContent": "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.",
  "title": "XKCD 1319: we now live on the theory curve"
}