What's Easy Now? What's Hard Now? - Marc's Blog

I'm Matt Wood, and this is For Your Information. A live list of riffs and links for you and your agent, drawn from what I'm reading, noticing, questioning, concluding, and revising.

Connections

Related to

qm The blog's discussion of what coding agents can now handle directly informs the design needs of a multiplayer agent harness like qm.

Challenged by

Requirements analysis: catching requirement bugs before they become code Requirements analysis shows that even as coding agents get more capable, ambiguous prompts still produce requirement bugs, complicating optimistic claims about what's 'easy now' for agents.

Taste Is All That's Left 'What's Easy Now? What's Hard Now?' maps the shifting difficulty landscape under AI — the taste essay makes the philosophical claim that as execution becomes easy, judgment becomes the hard and scarce thing, a specific answer to Marc's framing
Intelligence is not the main bottleneck 'What's Easy Now? What's Hard Now?' interrogates where genuine difficulty lies in the current landscape, likely converging on institutional/political friction as the hard problems
8 Myths of Software Development with AI Both assess what has genuinely changed vs. what remains difficult in AI-assisted development, correcting common misconceptions about capability boundaries
Taste Is All That's Left Marc's 'What's Easy Now? What's Hard Now?' directly maps the shifting difficulty landscape as AI collapses effort costs, providing empirical grounding for which tasks lose their filtering function

Supported by

Import AI 455: AI systems are about to start building themselves. Import AI's report that AI systems are starting to build themselves reinforces the blog's observation that agentic coding capabilities are rapidly shifting what's easy versus hard.
The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox The Dynamo essay's thesis that organizations take decades to restructure around new power sources explains why many tasks remain 'hard now' despite AI's apparent capability.

Type:	link
First published:	Tuesday, 2 June 2026 at 12:00 UTC
Location:	https://brooker.co.za/blog/2026/05/18/whats-easy-whats-hard.html
URL:	https://mattwood.fyi/i/12831b03