In the last days of 2025, among tech commenters in rarefied corners of X, a new consensus emerged: AGI was here. By AGI, they meant artificial general intelligence—a term of art usually taken to denote computer programs that can match or exceed human capabilities at most economically valuable tasks. The immediate cause for the excitement was a series of updates to Anthropic’s AI coding tool, Claude Code, allowing it to complete complex programming tasks far more reliably, and with far less human supervision, than before. Taken merely as another productivity boost for software engineers, this would not be especially noteworthy. But understood as a stepwise improvement in a general system capable of performing almost any kind of computer-mediated work, it looked like a watershed: the automation not merely of coding as a specialized skill but potentially of any work performed with a computer. An Anthropic engineer posted that Claude Code was, itself, written almost entirely by a previous version of Claude Code. Its human overseers focused on “foundational architectural and product decisions,” while the AI implemented the solutions. Even the most in-the-weeds engineers on his team hardly wrote their own code anymore; they instead directed a team of agents. The long-foretold transformation of work seemed to have arrived. So, too, perhaps, had the man–computer symbiosis first described over 60 years ago by J. C. R. Licklider. “I have to constantly model the mind of [AI agents] living inside my laptop, and in doing so I become more like them. . . . I think in context windows. I become a cyborg, a hive mind of human and clauds,” wrote one anonymous tech poster on X. Finally, a reason to check your email. Sign up for our free newsletter today. And yet as excitement about the singularity grew in and around