Sarah Chen, a security engineer based in Seattle, spent her Tuesday evening staring at a terminal window that refused to stop scrolling. In less than three minutes, an automated system powered by a large language model had identified ninety-four memory leaks in a codebase her team had spent three years writing. She rubbed her eyes, closed her laptop, and went to make tea, feeling a strange mix of gratitude and sudden obsolescence.
This quiet reckoning is happening on a national scale. Between January and late