Updater, Shannon Liao's newsletter

Updater, Shannon Liao's newsletter

Developers debunk A.I. hype and never-before-published Lego, Star Wars interviews

Gearing up with gadgets, and soon Pokémon Pokopia

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Shannon Liao
Mar 12, 2026
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Hey all, I didn’t attend the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco this week, however, I still have interviews scheduled with devs, just after the show. Follow along to see what I’m doing instead this month.

Can A.I. code at a senior level?

Is A.I. coming for us all, or is just over-hype from A.I. companies? If you’re on the same side of the internet that I’m on, you may have seen a lot of alarm bells ringing… but the people ringing them have all the wrong incentives for us to take their claims at face value.

Ever-skeptical, I noted claims that A.I. can now code at the level of a senior software engineer. I should disclose here, my partner works at Spotify, and his work is growing even more A.I.-heavy, although it’s actually resulted in him putting in more hours than before. I heard echoes of this across the tech and gaming industries.

Earlier last week, think tank policy director Eli Dvorkin told the New York Times that “A.I. can now write code at the level of a senior software engineer.” He reasoned that a new plan should be created to ensure students developed the skills needed to use A.I. I posted this excerpt from the article about how New York lagged behind other states’ school systems in adopting A.I. onto X, formerly Twitter, and received plenty of replies from engineers and game developers.

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