The Winter Something Changed

In the first week of December 2025, a Google principal engineer sat down with Claude Code and described, in plain English, a problem her team had just spent the past year trying to solve.

Three paragraphs. A brief description of the problem with “no real details,” she said, because she couldn’t share anything proprietary, especially not on a competitor’s platform.

J.C.R. Licklider

"Human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought."

Man-Computer Symbiosis · 1960

→ On AI: Chapter 4: What Licklider Got Right — The Coupled System

One hour later, Claude had produced a working prototype of her team's system. It wasn’t perfect, but for what it was – toying around with a system, just to see what it could produce – it was stunning.

She posted about it publicly.

“I am not joking,” she wrote on X, “and this isn’t funny.”

Kevin Kelly

Wrote What Technology Wants — frames technology as autonomous force with its own…

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