AIWA "The One Thing" #06: 82 Million views on 'Something Big Is Happening.' AI builds itself. Humans move up the stack.

“Something Big Is Happening” by Matt Shumer racked up 73 million views on Twitter within 48 hours and is now up to 82 million.

Reactions to the essay that immediately captured the AI zeitgeist have run the gamut including this one from the legendary Benedict Evans, who has a way with words:

The most interesting part of the essay that isn’t capturing the attention I think it should?

The recursive AI point and what it means for how humans move up the stack.

AI helped build itself, each generation contributing to the next. What once felt like science fiction is now a reality that can be found in OpenAI technical documentation.

As AI codes, learns and iterates more autonomously, the human role doesn’t disappear, it elevates.

We move up the stack.

Here are three things happening simultaneously that all point in the same direction:

1: Engineers move closer to the business
As Amjad Masad pointed out in the tweet below, engineers freed from implementation work get to focus on cross-functional collaboration, product strategy and building better systems faster.

2: Operators and SMEs become builders
The people closest to the problem get to vibe code prototypes, increasing the quality and speed of customer feedback loops. This enables AI-augmented engineers to build production-grade applications and intelligent systems with unprecedented precision.

3: The bridge builders and cross-functional teams, the ultimate rockstars
The insights from Soumith Chintala, CTO of Thinking Machines Lab via The Tech Club at Harvard Business School Conference hit hard (s /o William Zhu for doing an outstanding job paraphrasing them).

“Technical literacy earns trust, and trust is how cross-functional teams ship great products.”

“The most valuable people in the future won’t be purely technical or purely creative. They’ll bridge both.”

Different constraints, different bottlenecks to solve for. The screen isn’t the unit of value. The collective judgment of what to build on that screen is.

Those who move up the stack now won’t just survive this moment.

They’ll define it.