The Inflection Point: Why Renowned Programmers Changed Their Minds on AI Coding

As I write this today in mid of January 2026, I can't shake off this feeling. Something flipped in last few weeks. Hackernews/reddit are filled with links to posts from purist, respected programmers (that I have personally looked up to since 2007 when I started studying programming) suddenly singing praises of LLM coding. Some of these had previously written off "(Vibe/Agentic) Coding with AI" as something that was good for hobby/mini projects, code reviews or first draft.

What caused this? I thought that maybe this was due to Opus 4.5, and Simon Willison (co-creators of Django web framework) confirmed my suspicion in his post titled "The November 2025 inflection point":

It genuinely feels to me like GPT-5.2 and Opus 4.5 in November represent an inflection point - one of those moments where the models get incrementally better in a way that tips across an invisible capability line where suddenly a whole bunch of much harder coding problems open up.

Thought AI coding was overhyped? You might want to reconsider and try out either Opus 4.5 or GPT5.2.

Don't just take my word for it. I present Exhibit A, what renowned programmers (that have inspired me in my career) are actually saying about this:

David Heinemeier Hansson (aka DHH) - Creator of Ruby on Rails

...CTO at 37signals/Basecamp & author of Rework book.

On January 7, 2026, he wrote in Promoting AI agents:

Yes, I'm ready to give the current crop of AI agents a promotion. They're no longer just here to help me learn, answer my questions, or check my work. They're fully capable of producing production-grade contributions to real-life code bases.
Supervised collaboration, though, is here today. I've worked alongside agents to fix small bugs, finish substantial features, and get several drafts on major new initiatives. The paradigm shift finally feels real.

Salvatore Sanfilippo (aka antirez) - Creator of Redis.

On January 11, 2026, he wrote in Don't fall into the anti-AI hype:

I love writing software, line by line. It could be said that my career was a continuous effort to create software well written, minimal, where the human touch was the fundamental feature. I also hope for a society where the last are not forgotten... But, I would not respect myself and my intelligence if my idea of software and society would impair my vision: facts are facts, and AI is going to change programming forever.

I thought that we had more time before programming would be completely reshaped, at least a few years. I no longer believe this is the case. Recently, state of the art LLMs are able to complete large subtasks or medium size projects alone, almost unassisted, given a good set of hints about what the end result should be.

Jordan Hubbard  - Co-creator of FreeBSD OS

...along with serious stints at Apple, NVIDIA & Uber)

On January 19, 2026, he wrote in his Linkedin post:

I'm NOT going to call this activity vibe-coding anymore. I refuse. I won'd judge others for using that term, but I will henceforth refer to it as agentic coding "AC" (shorter than "agent assisted coding") because there are no longer any "vibes" about this process for me. I think that Agentic Coding is, in fact, an intensely disciplined activity if one wishes to get the best results so I think it deserves a better categorization!

This is what we used to call "code leverage" and it's accelerating INSANELY for me now. You won't believe what's coming next for AC because I can scarcely believe it myself. 

Linus Torvalds - Creator of Linux

On January 8, 2026, he wrote in his git commit message:

This is Google Antigravity fixing up my visualization tool (which was also generated with help from google, but of the normal kind). It mostly went smoothly, although I had to figure out what the problem with using the builtin rectangle select was. After telling antigravity to just do a custom RectangleSelector, things went much better. Is this much better than I could do by hand? Sure is. 

Simon Willison - Co-creator of Django

On January 8, 2026, he wrote in his blogpost LLM predictions for 2026:

I think that there are still people out there who are convinced that LLMs cannot write good code. Those people are in for a very nasty shock in 2026. I do not think it will be possible to get to the end of even the next three months while still holding on to that idea that the code they write is all junk and it’s it’s likely any decent human programmer will write better code than they will.

In 2023, saying that LLMs write garbage code was entirely correct. For most of 2024 that stayed true. In 2025 that changed, but you could be forgiven for continuing to hold out. In 2026 the quality of LLM-generated code will become impossible to deny.

Since Claude Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2 came out in November and December respectively the amount of code I’ve written by hand has dropped to a single digit percentage of my overall output. The same is true for many other expert programmers I know.

At this point if you continue to argue that LLMs write useless code you’re damaging your own credibility.

Terence Tao - Renowned mathematician who won Fields Medal 

... Royal Medal, Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics in 2014, and is a 2006 MacArthur Fellow.

On January 8. 2026, he posted online that GPT-5.2 solved an Erdos problem "more or less autonomously... after some feedback from an initial attempt".

For the uninitiated, Erdos Problems are unsolved mathematical conjectures/problems by prolific mathematician Paul Erdős and his collaborators. In Erdős' own words:

Problems have always been an essential part of my mathematical life. A well-chosen problem can isolate an essential difficulty in a particular area, serving as a benchmark against which progress in this area can be measured. It might be like a 'marshmallow', serving as a tasty tidbit supplying a few moments of fleeting enjoyment. Or it might be like an 'acorn', requiring deep and subtle new insights from which a mighty oak can develop. […]

In this note I would like to describe a variety of my problems which I would classify as my favorites. Of course, I can't guarantee that they are all 'acorns', but because many have thwarted the efforts of the best mathematicians for many decades (and have often acquired a cash reward for their solutions), it may indicate that new ideas will be needed, which can, in turn, lead to more general results, and naturally, to further new problems.

In this way, the cycle of life in mathematics continues forever.

 

-- Paul Erdős, Some of my favorite problems and results, 1997

Edit: added on 20 Jan 2026, when my friend Deepak Shah shared this with me:

Ryan Dahl - Creator of Node.js

On January 19, 2026, he posted on X.com:

This has been said a thousand times before, but allow me to add my own voice: the era of humans writing code is over. Disturbing for those of us who identify as SWEs, but no less true. That's not to say SWEs don't have work to do, but writing syntax directly is not it.

So skeptics of AI-powered development, here is my suggestion: consider this your invitation to try Opus 4.5 or GPT5.2 and see what's changed.