What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality

The context for some of these posts are yet-another-null-result coming out, saying that AI isn't having the expected objective result, with the posts defending AI by saying that it totally changed just after the cut-off the research. Evolutionary step changes are definitely a thing, but the problem isn't that AI is having such step changes, it's that you're saying that the most recent step change is the one that shows the improvement, and every study that comes out saying "no, that wasn't," the response to that is, "no, there's a new change that is totally the key inflection point!"

Or, put differently: if a study comes out next year saying they don't see major impacts from AI in 2026, will you admit your viewpoint as being wrong, or is your response going to be "no, there was a massive inflection point in September 2026 that completely invalidates the paper"?

Paul Ford wrote a great piece about this in the NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/opinion/ai-software.html?...

> November was, for me and many others in tech, a great surprise. Before, A.I. coding tools were often useful, but halting and clumsy. Now, the bot can run for a full hour and make whole, designed websites and apps that may be flawed, but credible. I spent an entire session of therapy talking about it.

Max Woolf is a good one: https://minimaxir.com/2026/02/ai-agent-coding/

> The real annoying thing about Opus 4.6/Codex 5.3 is that it’s impossible to publicly say “Opus 4.5 (and the models that came after it) are an order of magnitude better than coding LLMs released just months before it” without sounding like an AI hype booster clickbaiting, but it’s the counterintuitive truth to my personal frustration. [...] A year ago, I was one of those skeptics who was very suspicious of the agentic hype.

DHH - https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/dhhs-new-way-of-w...

> Six months ago, in an episode of the Lex Fridman podcast, David shared how he doesn’t use AI tools to write code: he types out all his code. But things have changed a lot since then.

> In this episode, we discuss his approach to building software, how it’s changed in the last six months, and why he now takes an agent-first approach, and how he barely writes any code by hand.

Linus Torvalds, two weeks ago (though I don't have evidence that he was a skeptic before) https://lore.kernel.org/linux-media/CAHk-=wi4zC+Ze8e+p3tMv8T...

> There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but "is it useful" is no longer one of those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used it.

Donald Knuth! https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cyc...

> Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I'd been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6 - Anthropic's hybrid reasoning model that had been released three weeks earlier! It seems that I'll have to revise my opinions about "generative AI" one of these days. What a joy it is to learn not only that my conjecture has a nice solution but also to celebrate this dramatic advance in automatic deduction and creative problem solving.

Ah, you’re right.. the dots! I still don’t understand why the smoothing makes covid symmetric when the underlying data is asymmetric. A too-large smoothing window, I guess. They must have been trying to smooth out the seasonal job unemployment rates for the labor-heavy jobs.

this is not happening because ai is so good it can replace workers. its because its good enough to look like it can replace workers to a non technical manager, and that gives execs an excuse to fire people (or not hire them) so they can show better margins and get a bonus. even if they know it kills the company long term.

the root of the problem is the same as most other economic problems in this world. financial capitalism is designed to reward short term profits, and shareholders create an asymmetric incentive where ceos dont really get fired for doing too many layoffs but can be fired easily for not doing enough.

AI is only replacing low-level work. It will eventually move on to high-level work.

One missing point: careers that require communication, especially person-to-person, won't be replaced by AI. Why? Because people don't like to speak with AI when they have a hard pain point to solve. It's not about intelligence; it's about trust and relationships that AI cannot replace.