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.”

Anyone working on AI systems in late 2025 could relate to the whiplash she felt. In Slack channels, Reddit threads,