Jeff Harris

Pay attention to the shock and vertigo the cyber world is going through right now. This is what it feels like when rising AI capabilities stop being hypothetical. Sooner or later, everyone will get their own version of this. The pattern goes like this. Models improve and a new capability appears at the frontier but doesn’t immediately become tangible. Insiders make predictions that get either ignored or dismissed as delusion, fear-mongering, or IPO hype. Proofs of concept slowly arrive but are written off as contrived and only appreciated within narrow research circles. Time moves on, everyday life remains familiar, and people speculate that the predictions were overblown. Then come the first sparks hinting that practical thresholds are being crossed. Suddenly, a phase change happens and some delicately maintained equilibrium shatters overnight. We’ve watched this play out a few times in the last year. Software engineering went first. Despite being the field watching AI most closely and adopting it most eagerly, software engineering was left shellshocked by the exploding utility of coding agents near the start of this year. Programming changed more in 2026 than it had in the last 15 years combined, and things are only continuing to accelerate. Nobody knows what it will mean to be a software engineer in a few years. Mathematics was next. Mathematicians went from laughing at the idea of LLMs being useful, to moving the goalposts (‘it’s just brute-forcing counterexamples’) when the Jacobian Conjecture fell, to being thrown into an existential spiral a few weeks ago when hundreds of frontier math results were quietly dropped overnight. The field is now steeped in debate about what it could possibly mean to be an effective mathematician as AI continues to improve. Now it’s cyber’s turn. Dramatic improvements in cyber capabilities were demonstrated during the Mythos preview in April, and massive white-hat operations like Daybreak and Glasswing were launched to give defenders a head start in hardening their systems. Months passed, and people began to suspect that the risks were overblown. Meanwhile, capabilities continued to diffuse into open source and non-frontier models. At some point, a critical mass was reached and we underwent a phase transition: critical vulnerabilities in the web’s core infrastructure and high-profile attacks on industry targets started landing at a drumbeat pace. All of this is after months of efforts to give defenders a head start, and before frontier offensive capabilities are even broadly available (note: it actually seems like many of the recent vulns are coming out of white hat programs). I suspect 3D modeling, animation, and video editing are entering this same interval between impressive demonstrations and widespread consequences. These fields will soon make contact with a rapidly changing reality. Take note of this feeling, the disorientation before the normalization treadmill kicks in and we all go back to pretending things are normal. Use it as your reference point for what the climb toward ASI will actually feel like. 2027 is going to be fucking insane.