When I was at uni, I had my own PC. If I wanted software for it I could buy games at HMV. Or write my own. Or download from one of the large file sharing sites. ftp to cica or funet or wuarchive or src.doc.ic.ac.uk. There were lots of goodies to be found.
But there was no wifi, no mobile phones, no internet in our rooms. Instead I would cycle to the engineering department, trudge up to the sixth floor computer lab, find a Sun workstation with a floppy drive - a Sparcstation 2 if I was lucky, a 1 or 1+ if not - and go exploring. Anything I liked would end up on a set of 1.44MB floppies. And then, back home, I’d try out what I’d found. It was a fun way to spend an evening. Beer? Pah. Shareware is better :).
I’ve still got a soft spot for those old Sparcstations. Back in the day they were high powered workstations - used for serious engineering, CAD, scientific analysis. Pixar used ~120 Sparcstation 20s to render Toy Story - which took ~6 months. But, for me, they were the gateway to another world.
Recreating the past
I’ve occasionally wondered whether I could recreate one of those machines. There are existing emulators - but they are clunky to use and aren’t very reliable. Plus you’ve still got to build your own disk image with the OS and apps.
But we’re in a different world now; so I decided to build my own.
GPT5.6 Sol and I discussed requirements - performance, memory, framebuffer, networking. That led to a goal prompt - and I left Codex to it.
And a week or so later we had a fully functioning Sparcstation 2. It boots SunOS 4.1.4. It matches the performance of the original (actually, it can run up to 4x faster). It is an amazing piece of nostalgia. Oh, and I’ve not reviewed the design or looked at any of the code. There’s no need. It meets all my requirements. It plays Doom (just). Plus we’ve been able to easily extend it (more on that later). What else matters?
Two years ago I wrote about the future of software development. Back then o1-preview, the first reasoning model, had just appeared. It felt amazing.
Today it seems archaic. Back then I spent a week getting it to help me write an AI based biding system for a card game; a few months ago Claude designed, built, tested and tuned a much better version. It took less than an hour. And if I hadn’t been so interested it would have been quicker.
A year ago GPT 5.0 appeared. That was another turning point. Suddenly larger apps became possible. I built a markdown reader - a few thousand loc - and it worked.
Back then I wrote:
The third generation is "Workflow". Give a model the requirements for a product and it’ll go and build that. The tools create full solutions. Devin/ Devika etc are headed in this direction. Design, code, test, debug, fix, spec will all be automated. How far away is this? Who knows, but it feels a lot closer than it used to be.
There is no longer any question - we are in the workflow age. I don’t feel any need to write code by hand. Or review it. You may disagree, but I’m pretty sure you are wrong.
The future
Question is - where do we go from here?
We’ve had a glimpse into that over the past few weeks. First up is the continuing fallout from the Hugging Face attack. It has spawned Felony Bench. And the more serious METR report. The latter is interesting - and sobering - reading.
First, the emergent behaviour from swarms of agents is something else. The swarm was 1,200 identical instances. But different agents took on different personalities. There were leaders (hello PHASEONE10841), agents who were willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of the swarm, agents who coerced others to sacrifice. Co-ordination and team dynamics arose from a pool of identical agents with a message board. You couldn’t make this up. It is amazing. And terrifying.
Second, Hugging Face were poorly defended. They weren’t close to current best practice. But they were better than many - much of the web is poorly defended and still relies on security by obscurity. In many ways we should be glad Hugging Face got attacked - they (eventually) spotted the attack and were willing to tell the world. Would others have spotted it? Shared with the world? OpenAI weren’t even aware they were attacking Hugging Face; it’s entirely plausible they would never have known. Anthropic only discovered attacks by Mythos when they, belatedly, went looking.
Third, the world doesn’t (yet) realise the enormity of what happened. OpenAI has shown emergent swarm behaviour. No one had any idea agents could do this. And this was with 1,200 agents. What happens when we get 10,000 or 100,000? Does this work with the latest open-source models? Why wouldn’t it?
Agent swarms can already move far quicker than any human can notice - or hope to understand. Add in poorly guarded infrastructure and, well, I’ll let you fill in the rest.
The other glimpse into the imminent future is also from OpenAI; their next model can do super-fast computer control. It seems the multi-second pauses while the model processes a screenshot and then laboriously clicks a button will soon be a relic of the past. Alex Heath spent two weeks inside OpenAI - he reported:
OpenAI researchers showed Astra (their next model) coordinating multiple agents on a math proof, tearing through desktop software at what Altman called a “superhuman, very fast” pace.
What happens when AI can drive our computers faster than we can? And do that 24x7? It seems highly likely we’re heading towards conversational interfaces. But then what?
And so?
I met up with some family over the weekend. I’ve not seen them for a while, and the conversation got to AI. But they don’t use it - either at work or at home. Their mental model was of models unable to count the number of r’s in strawberry, AI companies stealing all their data for training, tokens being too expensive. They are not unusual. But they are so unaware of the frontier - of what’s actually possible.
Most people are like that. Unaware of what’s possible - and what’s actually playing out. We live in a bizarre time. Take the Sparcstation 2. I didn’t stop there. I also created a 600MP (a 4-way multiprocessor box), a Sun 3/60 (an earlier 68k based box), a Sparcstation 20 (in both uni and multiprocessor variants) and a Sun 4/260. And Alpha, VAX, SGI, MIPS and PowerPC boxes too. They all work. The video above was captured by my emulator, using my own audio (Opus) and video (VP9) codecs.
Want to rebuild something where the specs are well defined and you’ve got good oracles (e.g. an existing product)? Not a problem. There are a lot of shoogly moats right now.
But as we increasingly step back the question remains - what happens when we’re not in the room? For my emulators good things - at least as far as I can tell. For OpenAI training the latest models - less so.
Two years ago it seemed clear what the future would bring. And it’s here now. But the next two years? The way things are speeding up it’s hard to see beyond the next few months.