Ai

International Business Machines Chief Executive Arvind Krishna said the tech giant has used artificial intelligence, and specifically AI agents, to replace the work of a couple hundred human resources workers. As a result, it has hired more programmers and salespeople, he said. While there haven’t yet been widespread layoffs or downsizing as a result of AI across the economy, some business leaders have said they are holding down head count as they investigate the use of the technology.

This isn’t the 1-2 year thing of what happens when you have a super powerful software engineer. But over time, if everyone has these superhuman tools to create a ton of different stuff, you’re going to get incredible diversity. Part of it is going to be solving hard problems: solving diseases, advancing science, developing new technology that makes our lives better. But I would guess that a lot of it is going to end up being cultural and social pursuits and entertainment. I would guess the world is going to get a lot funnier, weirder, and quirkier, the way that memes on the internet have gotten over the last 10 years.

75 percent of the queries that get put into Google get answered without you leaving Google, get answered on that page. So if you want to ask, when did David Rubenstein start Carlyle? About ten years ago it would take you to maybe a Wikipedia page or something else. Today, the answer comes up right on the page, and you don’t have to go anywhere else. The consequence of that means that original content creators that are creating that content, if they were deriving value through selling subscriptions or putting up ads, or just the ego of knowing that someone is reading your stuff, that’s gone, right? That’s has fallen off a cliff. And that’s the good news. So it was two to one ten years ago for Google. It’s six to one today. What do you think it is for OpenAI? 250 to one. What do you think it is for Anthropic? Six thousand to one, right?

Programming, at its essence, is conversation with computers. It’s how we translate human intention into machine action. Throughout computing history, we’ve continuously built better translation layers between human thought and machine execution—from physical wiring to assembly language to high-level languages to the World Wide Web, which embedded calls to backend systems into a frontend made up of human-readable documents. LLMs are simply the next evolution in this conversation, making access to computer power more natural and accessible than ever before.

I was describing GitHub Copilot. Or Claude Codex. Or OpenAI lmnop6.5 ultra watermelon. This isn’t about tools or productivity or acceleration. It’s about the illusion of progress. Because if that programmer-if that thing, that CREATURE-walked into your stand-up in human form, typing half-correct garbage into your codebase while ignoring your architecture and disappearing during cleanup, you’d fire them before they could say ’no blockers'.

A hilarious takedown of the bolder claims of AI coding. The truth is, AI does a great job of orienting and summarizing. But co-pilot.. please. Or as Jj offers ‘Copilot isn’t that. It’s just the ghost of a thousand blog posts and cocky stack-overflow posts’. Real.

Returning to a measure we introduced in 2023, we examine American data on employment by occupation, singling out the type of workers that are often believed to be vulnerable to ai. These are white-collar employees, describing people in back-office support, financial operations, sales and much more besides. There is a similar pattern here: we find no evidence of an ai hit (see chart 2). Quite the opposite, in fact. In the past year the share of employment in white-collar work has risen very slightly.

Microsoft is not talking about replacing developers. It says GitHub Copilot – and the latest version of the product called “Coding agent” – are tools to partner with developers, akin to a peer programmer.

Seeing as how many of the autonomous bots have failed for me personally, I definately appreciate a pragmatic approach to AI coding detailed here.

_{Quote Citation: GERGELY OROSZ, “Microsoft is dogfooding AI dev tools’ future”, MAY 27, 2025, https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/microsoft-ai-dev-tools}

My exact words to a small group of our finance, legal and talent colleagues last week: ‘You are committing career suicide if you’re not aggressively experimenting with AI.’

The reality is, we don’t know today how much AI will do in the future. But lots of companies are betting on a lot. Even if AI doesn’t take your job, someone who is using AI will. Is the mantra I hear most repeated.

And then, almost overnight, business leaders see the savings of replacing humans with AI — and do this en masse. They stop opening up new jobs, stop backfilling existing ones, and then replace human workers with agents or related automated alternatives.

Be it automation, off shoring, or just plain ‘do more with less’ AI is accelerating automation of many tasks. I know the long view is that technology results in more jobs. But when will they come?

During a fireside chat with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Meta’s LlamaCon conference on Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that 20% to 30% of code inside the company’s repositories was “written by software” — meaning AI.

I wish business had learned their lesson when once upon a time they tried to measure output by lines of code (LOC). Now we have this made up metric of ‘accepted’ suggestions. There’s lots of better ways to measure effectiveness, how fast the printer goes isn’t one of them.