Beyond Code

Chapter 17

What We Build Next

In the time it took you to read this book, the landscape changed. That sentence is not a rhetorical device. The rate of change in AI capability follows what researchers have begun to call the Densing Law, documented in Nature Machine Intelligence in 2025: capability per parameter doubles approximately every three and a half months. The cost of frontier reasoning models collapsed by a factor of twenty-seven in a single generation (from roughly fifteen dollars per million input tokens to fifty-five cents). The model that produced the dysfunction experiments is already slower, smaller, and less capable than the model available as you read this sentence. The context windows once described as finite and precious have ...