a retraction: earlier I was snarky about how so-called "AI" so-called "tools" have been out for 3 years and there's nothing to show for it—no groundbreaking movies or novels written by chatbots, no visible explosion of new software, no medical or math breakthroughts, no improvements to software stability or security with so-called "AI" so-called "assistance", et cetera.

turns out I was wrong; there's been an explosion in new software after all, this year, in mobile apps at least. Look at the iOS stats and tremble at the power of chatbots!

(Source: "Writing code vs. shipping code: Productivity effects across generations of [so-called] 'AI' coding tools" (Demirer et al., 2026).Graph: John Burn-Murdoch.)