From coding to everything
The same pattern keeps repeating and the implications are hard to overstate.
Today I want to talk about a pattern I’ve been watching unfold since roughly December, a pattern that I think has profound implications for anyone who works with their brain for a living.
The coding revolution
Back in March of 2025 I wrote about building my OneFocus app, a simple task management tool built to my exact specifications, in about an hour, with next to zero coding experience. It felt like magic.
But that was a straightforward HTML proof-of-concept, and it was just the beginning.
Starting around December 2025, something shifted in a very big way. The agentic coding tools (things like Replit) crossed a threshold. They went from “impressive but not ready for prime time” to “genuinely capable and reliable coworker” almost overnight.
I’m not a software developer. I never studied computer science formally. But since that shift I have built dozens of useful, everyday applications, including tools that are now the backbone of how we run our business at CopelandBEC. Not toys. Not experiments. Production tools that we rely on every single day.
Not only that, but the pace of our in-house development is staggering. We make more progress on these tools in a week, working on them on the side, than real software companies used to make in a year.
The tools got so capable so quickly that the bottleneck is no longer the coding. The bottleneck is having a clear idea of what you want to build. If you can describe it properly (and I mean literally speak it into a computer) these tools can build it.
The pattern is repeating
Here’s the thing that I’m thinking a lot about now: the same pattern is now showing up in general knowledge work.
With coding, the progression was:
AI chatbots were helpful assistants for small, discrete tasks (debugging, learning, building simple tools that required additional work and technical ability to deploy)
AI developed into semi-autonomous workers (agentic tools that plan, execute, and check their own work across many steps and then deploy it in the real world)
The change from #1 to #2 facilitated a sudden, dramatic expansion of what’s possible for one person to bring into being.
I wrote in January about Claude Cowork, Anthropic’s tool that brings this agentic capability to everyday office work. You give it a task involving documents, spreadsheets, data analysis, file organization. It plans the work, executes it, checks its results, and iterates until it’s right.
This week Perplexity launched something called Computer, which orchestrates multiple AI models across research, coding, design, and project management in a single cloud-hosted system.
These are not incremental improvements to chatbots. They represent a fundamentally different way of working, where you describe a desired outcome and a capable system goes off and does the work.
The same threshold that coding crossed in December is now being crossed for knowledge work more broadly.
I don’t think the before/after line is quite as bright here, as I think this type of knowledge work is a lot “fuzzier” and more general than coding, but in concept it’s the same idea. This kind of thing (you describe outcome -> agent does complex work and produces decent results) simply did not exist before 2026; now it does.
It’s about leverage
In life we all have the same 24 hours in a day. There are always more ideas than hours, always more things I want to build, explore, or improve than I have capacity for. Good ideas wither simply because there is no time or energy left to pursue them.
What one person can create in those same 24 hours, though, is expanding. Rapidly.
The capacity to do things—to build a tool, analyze data, create a document, research a market, design a workflow—is exploding. Not in some theoretical future. Right now, in February 2026.
This means the constraint is shifting. It’s no longer primarily about bandwidth. It’s about vision.
Can you articulate what you want? Can you describe the thing clearly enough that a capable system can go build it? Can you look at your business, your workflow, your career and identify the highest-leverage opportunities?
That’s the new skill. Developing that skill means, first and foremost, putting in the work to learn and practice. It also means developing taste, judgment, expertise, and a deep understanding of how your work actually creates value.
What this means for you
I’m learning as I go, the same as everyone else. I’m playing with these tools every day, breaking things, being surprised by what works and what doesn’t. Chasing curiosity, incorporating lessons, and trying again.
But here’s what I’m increasingly confident about:
If you work in professional services—architecture, engineering, consulting, law, accounting, whatever—the window to get ahead of this curve is open right now. The tools are here. The capabilities are real. And most of your competitors are still figuring out ChatGPT fundamentals or pretending none of this is happening at all.
The people who will thrive will be the ones who combine domain expertise with the curiosity to experiment, genuinely question the core value proposition of what they do every day, and cultivate a willingness to rethink how work gets done.
Be well, talk soon.
-Matt