RSI isn't anything new though; computers have been used to make computers better for about 80 years now.
Imagine having a secretary who could read 1 million records and give you back your answer in 100 microseconds, for just 10 cents an hour. That's Postgres.
So I'd imagine that is R&D can be automated, that everything becomes better and cheaper but we'd all lose our jobs, as secretaries did to postgres. UBI season
"We make a tentative calibration of the self-sustaining ac
celeration condition using the existing data that is available, measuring AI capabilities using the Epoch Capabilities Index (Ho et al., 2025).
We find that the condition is met if a one-unit increase in AI model capabilities results in at least 15% higher AI R&D pro ductivity.
A rough back-of-the-envelope calculation based on reported AI engineer uplift
suggests this return has been around 9% since the launch of coding agents.
This number is below the model-implied threshold, suggesting we are not experiencing a self-sustaining acceleration."
And the source of this data seems to be self-reported productivity gains from
surveys: 1.4–2X in METR’s survey of technical workers (Becker, 2026).
A bit flimsy basis but an interesting paper nonetheless.
When I hear recursive self improvement all I remember are the ridiculous articles a few years ago about how 3d printers were going to make themselves and take over the world.
Imagine having a secretary who could read 1 million records and give you back your answer in 100 microseconds, for just 10 cents an hour. That's Postgres.
So I'd imagine that is R&D can be automated, that everything becomes better and cheaper but we'd all lose our jobs, as secretaries did to postgres. UBI season
We find that the condition is met if a one-unit increase in AI model capabilities results in at least 15% higher AI R&D pro ductivity.
A rough back-of-the-envelope calculation based on reported AI engineer uplift suggests this return has been around 9% since the launch of coding agents.
This number is below the model-implied threshold, suggesting we are not experiencing a self-sustaining acceleration."
And the source of this data seems to be self-reported productivity gains from surveys: 1.4–2X in METR’s survey of technical workers (Becker, 2026).
A bit flimsy basis but an interesting paper nonetheless.