GPT-5.5 dropped yesterday under the rumoured codename Spud, and I’ve been hammering on it inside Codex for most of today. I want to say something that probably won’t be popular. It feels a lot like GPT-5.4.
That’s not a bad thing exactly, but it’s also not the leap the X timeline had me bracing for. Every leaker for the past month was whispering about big model smell. The general vibe was that OpenAI was about to drag the throne back from Anthropic in one swing. Sam’s strawberry potato tweet didn’t help calm anyone down. By the time the announcement landed, half the AI internet had convinced itself we were getting a generational jump.
You spent years building expertise. Learning the domain. Mastering the tools. Understanding the nuances that only come with experience. This expertise is your value. It is why people pay you. It is why you have a career.
It has an expiration date. And that date is approaching faster than you think.
This is not pessimism. This is pattern recognition. The half-life of expertise is shortening. The skills that were valuable for decades are now valuable for years. The knowledge that used to compound is now depreciating. The ground is shifting under everyone’s feet.
In 2008, the financial crisis destroyed millions of jobs. The unemployment rate doubled. People lost homes, savings, careers. It was the worst economic crisis in generations and it scarred everyone who lived through it.
I think we are headed for something worse. Not a financial crisis. An automation crisis. The kind of job displacement that makes 2008 look like a practice run.
This is not going to happen all at once. It is going to happen gradually, then suddenly, the way these things always happen. And when it hits, we will not be ready because we spent the warning period arguing about whether it was real.
I have a ducted air conditioning system made by iZone. It works fine. There’s an app. The app does what apps do. You tap buttons, things happen. It’s perfectly adequate.
But I’m a developer, and perfectly adequate is never enough. I wanted to control my AC from the terminal. I wanted to type a command and have my house cool down. I wanted to ask an AI assistant to set up my bedtime routine and have it actually do it. Not some hypothetical future integration. Right now, on my local network, with no cloud dependency.
Someone alive today will be the last professional writer. Not the last person who writes. People will always write. But the last person who makes a living primarily by arranging words on behalf of others. That person exists right now. They might be in their twenties or thirties. They might be starting their career as I type this.
And they will be the last.
This sounds dramatic. It is dramatic. It is also, I think, probably true. The economics of professional writing have collapsed, and AI is accelerating that collapse to its conclusion.
Go look at job boards. Filter for junior or entry-level developer positions. Notice anything?
There are barely any. And the ones that exist have requirements that would have been mid-level a few years ago. Two years of experience for an entry-level role. A portfolio of shipped projects. Knowledge of seventeen different technologies. The junior developer job, as a category, is disappearing.
We have not admitted this yet. Bootcamps are still selling the dream. Universities are still churning out CS graduates. Everyone talks about the skills shortage.
For decades, we optimised for the wrong things. Memorisation. Credentials. Which university name you could drop. How many facts you could recall in an interview. The education system was built around filling heads with information that would be useful later.
Then AI happened and suddenly the information is just there. You do not need to remember it. You need to know how to get it.
The new skill is prompting. Not in the narrow sense of writing clever queries to ChatGPT. In the broader sense of knowing what to ask, how to ask it, and what to do with the answer. The people who thrive in the AI era will be the ones who can extract value from these tools. Credentials are becoming less relevant by the day.
I am going to be bleak for a moment. You should probably sit down.
AI is going to take a lot of jobs. Not in some distant science fiction future. Soon. Maybe not your specific job in the next twelve months, but within the next decade, the employment landscape is going to look radically different. And I do not think we are ready.
This is not doomerism. This is observation. The capabilities are improving faster than anyone predicted. The economic incentives are obvious. The companies building this technology are not doing it for fun. They are doing it because automation at scale is the most valuable thing in human history.
There’s a fantasy floating around tech circles that AI is about to make software developers obsolete. The logic goes something like this: AI can write code now, therefore anyone can build software, therefore we don’t need programmers anymore. It’s a seductive idea if you’ve never actually shipped production software.
I’ve been using AI coding assistants daily for well over a year now. Claude, Copilot, Cursor, the works. And here’s what I’ve learned: AI is genuinely transformative for experienced developers. It’s also genuinely dangerous in the hands of people who don’t know what they’re looking at.
Somewhere in the last year, we collectively decided that typing prompts into an AI and hoping for the best counts as software development. Andrej Karpathy coined the term “vibe coding” in February 2025, and what started as a cheeky observation has become an actual workflow for people shipping production code. This is a problem.
Let me be clear about something: I use AI coding tools every day. Claude, Copilot, Cursor. They’re genuinely useful. But there’s a massive difference between AI-assisted coding and vibe coding, and the industry seems determined to blur that line until someone’s startup implodes in a spectacular security breach.