XKCD 1319: we now live on the theory curve
28 May 26
For most of my career, XKCD 1319 has (like many XKCDs) felt funny but uncomfortably close to the truth. But now 6 months after the November 2025 inflection point Claude and friends have fundamentally changed this sort of thing. I’m now regularly writing scripts that run first time, then evaporate, then I go back to what I was actually doing. We now live on the theory curve.
I ran a web search to check if anyone had got there first. Of course they had. A Hacker News commenter made exactly the point last August, complete with the gleeful framing “productivity gains built from productivity gains.” Ah well, nothing new under the sun.
The cost-benefit arithmetic of automation, the thing XKCD 1319 mocked, is load-bearing in how developers think about their own time. If that arithmetic has genuinely changed, it’s a lot of mental machinery to retire.1
#Footnotes
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I am aware this is exactly what someone says before discovering they were on the reality curve all along. We’ll see. ↩
Cite this post
@online{swift2026xkcd1319WeNowLiveOnTheTheoryCurve,
author = {Ben Swift},
title = {XKCD 1319: we now live on the theory curve},
url = {https://benswift.me/blog/2026/05/28/xkcd-1319-we-now-live-on-the-theory-curve/},
year = {2026},
month = {05},
note = {AT-URI: at://did:plc:tevykrhi4kibtsipzci76d76/site.standard.document/2026-05-28-xkcd-1319-we-now-live-on-the-theory-curve},
}