I read Simon Willison's latest newsletter. He shares his vision for the near future and gives his industry predictions. Interestingly, both Karpathy and Willison push AGI/ASI out by a full 10 years. Elon Musk in his latest interview once again talked about 2026. I'll write about Musk's predictions in the next post.
*Simon Willison, in case you don't read him yet, is an engineer and co-creator of Django (the framework that powers Instagram, Pinterest, and thousands of other services).*
In short, Willison highlighted three key trends.
1. Programmers are stopping writing code by hand
With the release of next-generation models (think GPT-5), manual coding is becoming inefficient. An engineer's job is shifting to managing AI agents. The human describes the task and reviews the architecture, while the neural network handles writing the syntax. Willison himself notes that the percentage of his "manual" code is approaching zero, especially after the release of GPT 5.2 Pro and Opus 4.5 in late 2025.
2. Full AGI is at least 10 years away
Willison cites Andrej Karpathy: creating an autonomous agent capable of fully replacing a human hits a technical barrier. The problem is the absence of continual learning. Current models freeze after training. They don't memorize new experiences while working, the way humans do. Until this problem is solved, AI will remain a tool, not an independent employee.
3. The labor market will change sooner — in 5–6 years. And this will cause social unrest
Mass automation doesn't require superintelligence. Current models are already good enough to take on specific labor-intensive tasks:
- Data extraction: structuring information from thousands of PDF files.
- Legacy migration: rewriting old code in a modern language.
- Format conversion: transferring data between incompatible systems.
These tasks consume thousands of person-hours, and this is where the main reduction in manual labor will happen.
Link to the full text (you can also subscribe to the newsletter there): https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/8/llm-predictions-for-2026