Hard Fork

‘Something Big Is Happening’ + A.I. Rocks the Romance Novel Industry + One Good Thing

with Kevin Roose and Casey Newton, featuring Alexandra Alter
13 Feb 2026 20 min read 1h 5m
TL;DR

AI is entering a critical inflection point with agentic coding systems automating software development, potentially disrupting enterprise software businesses and white-collar jobs within months. Washington is waking up to the threat, while romance novelists are already using AI to produce 200+ books yearly—highlighting both the technology's rapid capability gains and growing industry backlash.

Key Moments
Kevin Roose
“everywhere I went, every meeting I had, um, people were sort of asking me, is this stuff real? Is it happening? Are we in the takeoff? Is the singularity approaching? Um, and it does feel like the sort of political salience of AI has gotten much much higher just in the past couple of weeks.”
Kevin describes the shift in Washington DC's perception of AI after visiting for book meetings
▶ 0:22
Casey Newton
“I can totally imagine a world in which you have sort of one or two full-time developers who are managing and overseeing and repairing your own internal software um and you don't have to pay for a bunch of seats for someone else's thing.”
Casey explains how AI-assisted development could threaten SaaS business models based on per-seat pricing
▶ 10:10
Kevin Roose
“I talked to a a executive at one of the big AI companies this week who said that basically right now software engineering is kind of 90% automated, right? You still need a human to check in on the code that's being written to make sure it works to fix things when they break.”
Kevin cites an industry executive's assessment of current automation levels in software engineering
▶ 16:02
Casey Newton
“They are predicting that at the current trajectory by the end of 2026 more than 20% of all daily commits on GitHub public projects will be authored by claude code.”
Casey references Semi Analysis data showing Claude Code's exponential growth in code contributions
▶ 19:30
Alexandra Alter
“if you learn how to prompt the bot correctly, it will write a pretty compelling sex scene. You have to give it kind of an outline. It helps if you give it a ton of information and tell it what subg genre you want to do because of course they've ingested all of these books from different subg genres.”
Alexandra explains the workflow for romance authors using AI to generate novels efficiently
▶ 27:25
About the show
›
Hard Fork is the New York Times' podcast about how technology is changing life, business, and culture. Hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton dig into the biggest stories in tech, from AI's rapid advancement to its impact on industries like publishing and software development.
Takeaways
1
**SaaS pricing models under existential pressure** The seat-based licensing that powers enterprise software is becoming obsolete as AI agents handle entire workflows autonomously. Companies like Salesforce and Workday face margin compression not from direct competition, but from outcome-based pricing models where customers pay only for results delivered. This shift is already visible in startups like Sierra (customer service) showing early success with this approach.
2
**Software development automation timeline collapsed** Industry executives predict full automation of software engineering by end of 2026, with the field already 90% automated today. Claude Code commits are projected to exceed 20% of all GitHub public commits by year-end—a trajectory suggesting hand-written code becomes obsolete within months, not years. This acceleration is driven by AI models' relentless 24/7 iteration capability and growing recursive self-improvement.
3
**AI disruption now mainstream political conversation** Washington DC's sudden focus on AI reflects genuine anxiety about white-collar job displacement, not speculative tech hype. This represents an inflection point where AI's threat transitions from tech industry debate to electoral politics—expect regulatory backlash (e.g., Bernie Sanders' data center moratorium bill) as unemployment impacts become visible in 2026-2027. AI companies are underestimating how much people already hate this technology.