XKCD 1319: we now live on the theory curve

28 May 2026

aidev

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 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 baked into how developers think about their own time. If that arithmetic has actually changed, it’s a lot of mental machinery to retire.1

Footnotes

  1. 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},
}