Paul Ford wrote a great piece about this in the NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/opinion/ai-software.html?...

> November was, for me and many others in tech, a great surprise. Before, A.I. coding tools were often useful, but halting and clumsy. Now, the bot can run for a full hour and make whole, designed websites and apps that may be flawed, but credible. I spent an entire session of therapy talking about it.

Max Woolf is a good one: https://minimaxir.com/2026/02/ai-agent-coding/

> The real annoying thing about Opus 4.6/Codex 5.3 is that it’s impossible to publicly say “Opus 4.5 (and the models that came after it) are an order of magnitude better than coding LLMs released just months before it” without sounding like an AI hype booster clickbaiting, but it’s the counterintuitive truth to my personal frustration. [...] A year ago, I was one of those skeptics who was very suspicious of the agentic hype.

DHH - https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/dhhs-new-way-of-w...

> Six months ago, in an episode of the Lex Fridman podcast, David shared how he doesn’t use AI tools to write code: he types out all his code. But things have changed a lot since then.

> In this episode, we discuss his approach to building software, how it’s changed in the last six months, and why he now takes an agent-first approach, and how he barely writes any code by hand.

Linus Torvalds, two weeks ago (though I don't have evidence that he was a skeptic before) https://lore.kernel.org/linux-media/CAHk-=wi4zC+Ze8e+p3tMv8T...

> There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but "is it useful" is no longer one of those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used it.

Donald Knuth! https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cyc...

> Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I'd been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6 - Anthropic's hybrid reasoning model that had been released three weeks earlier! It seems that I'll have to revise my opinions about "generative AI" one of these days. What a joy it is to learn not only that my conjecture has a nice solution but also to celebrate this dramatic advance in automatic deduction and creative problem solving.