Harry McCracken’s piece in Fast Company this morning lands on something I wrote about in my book, Spanning Change: Software Engineering in the AI Era.
Anthropic’s new Mythos model was trained for general competency, yet turned out to be exceptional at one specific thing: finding software vulnerabilities — including ones that went undetected for decades.
McCracken’s argument is that this is exactly why the AGI debate is the wrong frame. We don’t need to wait for some theoretical threshold where AI matches human intelligence at everything to take its impact seriously. The capabilities arriving right now are already reshaping what’s possible, for better and worse.
The platform shift is happening, sometimes in uneven, surprising capability jumps that don’t wait for a neat “AGI achieved” announcement. You don’t need to believe in a particular AGI timeline to recognize that your work, your tools, and your professional instincts are all being reshaped.
The engineers and teams who engage now, practically and deliberately, are the ones who’ll be ready when the next surprise arrives. The ones waiting for the theoretical debate to settle may find the river has already moved past them.