Interpolative Software

Much of the excitement around AI coding is downstream of the fact that a lot of software is interpolative. This has become especially true as of late, with the release of Opus 5.5, which is, I’d argue, superhumanly good at generating mass amounts of high-quality interpolative software.1 This post is mostly a reference post for an idea that I’ve been gesturing to near daily for the past several months. In 2026, software falls on a spectrum between interpolative software and novel software. The vast majority of the software that most SWEs write2, most of the time, is interpolative software. Interpolative software is code that is solidly within the training distribution of models. Sometimes this means that the agents were (likely) literally trained on examples of building pieces of software (e.g., “build a todo app”, “build a clone of xyz.com”), or building within particular APIs (e.g., React). Other times, the software “rhymes” with enough existing software, or exists in a well-defined…

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