We Should Be More Ambitious in Software Construction

Using Michael Malis's pgrust as an example, Dan Luu argues that with improvements in AI capabilities, developers can be more ambitious in software construction. While testing pgrust, Malis discovered multiple real bugs in Postgres, including an SP-GiST numeric bug, a JSONPath format cache bug, and a pgcrypto bug. The author also mentions that with GPT-5.1/5.2, it took only about 5 hours to build Azul AI, which surpasses humans under matched time controls.