The Five Levels: from Spicy Autocomplete to the Dark Factory – Dan Shapiro’s Blog
January 29, 2026
If you are just using ChatGPT to write your regex, you aren’t really getting the benefits of deflation. You’re just typing faster.
I’ve now seen dozens of companies struggling to put AI to work writing code, and each one has moved through five clear tiers of automation. That felt familiar, and I realized that the federal government had been there first – but for cars.
Here, Dan Shapiro uses the analogy of the 5 levels of autonomous driving to write about how developers and organisations are approaching code generation tools. This is a very useful framing of the challenge.
