On February 9th, 2026, Erick Herring sat down with Alex Tatiyants and Bill Parducci, hosts of LA CTO Forum to talk through the real economic impact of AI on software developers, something the industry often tip-toes around. Over his career, Herring has lived through nearly every major computing shift of the past four decades. Think mainframes to the commercial internet to the rise of the web. This all brings a perspective that's hard to find.

Herring describes the tech world as divided into two groups: those in the loop who are actively working with AI tools every day, and the rest of the world that hasn't yet felt the full weight of what's coming. "It's not actually time to turn your Claude bot loose," he said. "We're just not there yet." The tooling is improving, the models are impressive, but a fully autonomous software development lifecycle is still an open and genuinely uncertain question.

For everyone else, his message was more urgent. Change is arriving in stages, and most organizations won't recognize what's happening until they're already behind. "They're going to be experiencing it like it's happening to them," Herring said, "as opposed to them operating on it." It's a distinction that matters a lot if you're responsible for building or leading a software team right now.

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Check out the full video here: