The Capability Curve Has No Memory

Anthropic published a progress report last week that I have not been able to stop thinking about.

https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improveme...

Not because of the headline numbers, though those are striking enough. Claude authored over 80% of the code merged into Anthropic’s own codebase, and so are other frontier companies now. Engineers are shipping eight times more output per quarter than they did two years ago. An agent completing tasks that would take a skilled human sixteen hours, working continuously, without being redirected once.

What got me was the graph showing lines of code per engineer over time. Flat for four years. Then a sharp bend upward in 2025 when Claude started running code rather than just suggesting it, the ouroboros, a binary Gödel machine feeding code back into itself. Then steeper again in 2026 when agents started working autonomously over longer horizons.

Smart cookies, Anthropic. In just a few years they managed to get the moola, 1 trillion, in fact. Purchasing strategic infrastructure like Vercept, Bun, Coefficient Biohealth, Fractionless AI, and Stainless, the SDK experts, for whom Anthropic was one of their first larger clients, makes sense strategically.

I looked at that graph and felt two things at the same time. Genuinely impressed. I really like Anthropic, and, if I’m honest, I'm a little concerned.

Pretty much all of the brains and infrastructure in AI will be consolidated into a handful of companies, reminiscent of the 80's when Microsoft made deals with all the hardware manufacturers so Windows was the only licensed OS allowed. That's why Linux was smart to pivot to servers and retained 60% of market share to this day, Ubuntu is great; it works and very rarely has any reliability issues, along with Red Hat and Debian.