Jimmy KimCEO & Founder, Commerce Roundtable · Marketer of 17+ Years, 4x Founder. Former DTC/Retailer & SaaS Founder. Newsletter. Host of ASOM & Send it! Podcast. DTC Event: Commerce Roundtable

From Finishing Sentences to 200K Lines: AI's Insane Pace

24 Aug 2026 · 1 min

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1:07

In this commentary, the speaker argues that AI is poised to transform every computer‑based job, with software engineering serving as the leading indicator. Over the past 1.5 years, AI tools have progressed from simple autocomplete that merely finished a sentence to sophisticated voice‑driven systems that can generate entire applications. By speaking a five‑minute specification into a microphone, a developer can return after a coffee break to find a fully built codebase of roughly 200,000 lines. The speaker predicts that many business functions will increasingly resemble software engineering as these capabilities become mainstream, marking a rapid, disruptive shift in how work is performed on computers.

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If you look into how significantly AI is changing every single job that exists, especially the ones that are connected to pressing on a keyboard and moving the mouse. If you're working on a computer, AI will have a tremendous effect on your life. I'm very connected to the software engineering world. So I looked at what is happening in software engineering. For me, the core realization was that very likely many areas of a business will look like software engineering over time. Now, the shift that has happened there actually is not doing the actual work anymore. And with that transition, by the way, and people tend to forget that, has happened within about a year of time. 1.5 years ago, you would have AI systems that kind of helped to complete the sentence. Pretty handy stuff, but not revolutionary. People faster, but it would kind of add like the last 4 words to a sentence as a simple example. Now, 1.5 years later, you can literally just have your microphone and you speak into the computer for 5 minutes everything that you want to build today. And then you press enter and you go get a coffee for 10 minutes and you come back and everything is built. And it's like 200,000 lines of code that happen. It's a massive shift.