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The AI models released in November 2025 made agentic coding genuinely useful for the first time, and six months on, companies are now spending real money on the technology.
Simon Willison pinpoints November 2025 as the inflection point when AI agents became genuinely useful, explaining the current wave of corporate spending on the technology. ✦ AI generated
Simon Willison · The Pragmatic Engineer · 2026-06-23 · original ↗
The models released in November 2025 elevated agents to being genuinely useful. We've had six months to get used to that idea now; it's no wonder companies are beginning to spend real money on this technology.
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- ·Models released Nov 2025 made agents genuinely useful
- ·First time agentic coding truly worked
- ·Simon Willison marks this as the turning point
- ·Six months to adjust to agents' new capability
- ·Companies now spending real money on the tech
- ·Corporate spending follows directly from Nov 2025 shift
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explains mechanism → Among OpenAI's active internal Codex users, median combined output-token usage grew sharply across departments over six months: Research rose 56x, Customer Support 32x, Engineering 27x, and Legal 13x by June 2026 versus November 2025.OpenAI Economic Research · Latent Spacesupports → Cloud agents are only becoming mainstream now because coding models finally got good enough to run autonomously, agent infrastructure like MCP and skills matured, context windows grew large enough, and cloud providers built up enough GPU capacity.Gergely Orosz · The Pragmatic Engineer