3 years ago they could barely write a coherent poem and today they're performing at at least graduate student level across most tasks. As of today, AI is writing a significant chunk of the code around itself. Once AI crosses that threshold of consistently being above senior-level engineer level at coding it will reach a tipping point where it can improve itself faster than the best human expert. That's core technological recursive self-improvement but we have another avenue of recursive self-improvement as well: Agentic recursive self-improvement.
First there was LLMs, then there was LLMs with tool usage, then we abstracted the tool usage to MCP servers. Next, we will create agents that autodiscover remote MCP servers, then we will create agents which can autodiscover tools as well as write their own.
Final stage of agents are generalized agents similar to Claude Code which can find remote MCP servers, perform a task, then analyze their first run of completing a task to figure out how to improve the process. Then write its own tools to use to complete the task faster than they did before. Agentic recursive self-improvement. As an agent engineer, I suspect this pattern will become viable in about 2 years.