Notes
Short pieces about the methodology and architecture decisions behind the AI systems I ship — specs, evals, multi-agent orchestration, LLM integration, and the discipline of directing coding agents.
July 3, 2026
AI was supposed to be cheaper than a person
The whole business case for replacing a role with an agent is one number: the model is cheaper than the salary. In 2026 the bills started landing and the number stopped being true — Forbes ran the headline that AI can cost more than the people it replaced, Uber torched its annual AI budget in about four months, and Meta had to cap its own engineers. You didn't delete the work when you swapped in the agent. You converted a fixed salary into a metered token bill plus the senior time it now takes to check, correct, and clean up after it. Do that math before you do the layoff.
- business
- careers
July 1, 2026
We stopped hiring juniors. We're eating the seed corn.
Cutting junior engineers because a mid-level plus AI covers their work is locally rational and globally suicidal. Entry-level dev hiring has collapsed — postings down 40%+ from the 2022 peak, the junior share of hires roughly halved. But seniors don't spawn; they're grown, and you just defunded the farm. Apprenticeship was never about cheap labor. It's how judgment gets transmitted — the one thing AI is making more valuable and simultaneously harder to acquire.
- careers
- business
June 14, 2026
The AI coding speedup is smaller than it feels
In a controlled study, experienced developers using AI on their own codebases were measurably slower on complex tasks — and felt 20% faster the whole time. A 2026 follow-up with better methodology landed near a small positive, not a big one. Meanwhile ~93% of developers use AI tools and headline productivity has barely moved. None of this says AI coding is fake. It says the feeling of speed and the fact of speed have come apart, and if you manage by feel you'll manage wrong. Here's how to tell the difference.
- methodology
- careers
June 14, 2026
The AI layoff that comes back cheaper
Forrester predicts that half of the jobs cut in the name of AI will be quietly refilled — offshore, or at meaningfully lower pay. 55% of employers already regret their AI layoffs. And in plenty of cases the AI never replaced anyone: the work got shipped overseas and called automation. Amazon's cashierless 'Just Walk Out' stores turned out to lean on remote workers in India watching the cameras. If you're a worker or an honest builder, the lesson is the same: 'we cut staff because of AI' is often a story about cost, wearing AI as a costume. Here's how to read it.
- business
- careers
June 11, 2026
Adopt AI or get cut. But adopt the right thing.
A survey of 1,200 executives found 60% plan to lay off employees who won't use AI, and AI 'super-users' are getting the promotions and raises. So 'adopt AI or get cut' has stopped being a hot take and become HR policy. But almost everyone is misreading what 'adopt' means — and the same survey says so. The durable, well-paid skill isn't fluency with the tools. It's judgment about their output: knowing when not to use AI, and catching it when it's confidently wrong. Adopt that, not just the tool.
- careers
June 11, 2026
“AI is tearing my company apart”
A survey of 1,200 executives found that 54% say adopting AI is tearing their company apart — power struggles, IT-versus-everyone tension, a chaotic free-for-all. We keep framing AI as a technology decision: which model, which tools. But the people running these companies are telling you the real fight is organizational, not technical. AI doesn't just add a capability; it redraws who has power, hits before anyone wrote the rules, and changes roles faster than HR can keep up. That's a change-management problem wearing a technology costume.
- business
- careers