How far can AI go on a software task?
METR measures the duration of real software engineering tasks that AI models can reliably complete.
A community exploring the frontier of AI software engineering in Northern Ireland.
Come to our first event →AI systems have become very capable of developing software, mostly by working with a human in a pair programming way.
However, people have started to run more ambitious experiments. Initially, the focus was on automatically implementing software at the ticket level. More recently, people have started pushing toward fully automating the creation of software end to end, from an initial idea to a working commercial product.
If this becomes effective, it could have a very disruptive effect on the software development industry.
There is a great opportunity to master this technology before it becomes widespread, as it may become the foundation of the whole industry.
In the early days of personal computing, the Homebrew Computer Club gave people a place to learn, experiment, and get ahead of a major technological shift. We want to build something similar in Northern Ireland, so that developers, researchers, and businesses here can understand fully automated software engineering early, build practical skills, and help shape where this goes.
METR measures the duration of real software engineering tasks that AI models can reliably complete.
OpenAI shipped an internal product where every line of code (application logic, tests, CI, documentation) was written by their Codex agent. Zero lines written by hand.
Anthropic had 16 parallel Claude instances build a C compiler from scratch. Over two weeks, the agents produced 100,000 lines of code capable of compiling the Linux kernel.
Stripe's coding agents, called "Minions," produce over a thousand merged pull requests every week.
Spotify's background coding agent has merged over 1,500 PRs for fleet-wide code maintenance.
Cursor's multi-agent system peaked at around 1,000 commits per hour building a web browser with almost no human input.
StrongDM's AI team operates by an explicit principle: "Code must not be written by humans. Code must not be reviewed by humans."
How far and how fast this goes is genuinely unclear. But it does seem like something people in Northern Ireland should be talking about now.
Our first event looks at the shift from pair programming and ticket-level automation toward fully automated software engineering, and what that could mean for the future of the software industry.
We're building a community around this in Northern Ireland so people here can understand it early, build practical skills, and help shape where it goes. Open to developers, researchers, students, and people working in business.
WHEN Friday 8th May 2026 · 12–2pm
WHERE The Cube, Queen's Students' Union · Belfast
COST Free · Open to all
These are some of the things being published by engineering teams building in this space. We find it useful to keep track of what's being said, and by whom.
We are a group of engineers and researchers trying to make sense of what's happening.
