Chamath on how AI agents are making the "10x engineer" distinction disappear because the most efficient "code paths" are now obvious to everyone.
Just as AI solved chess and removed the mystery of the best move, AI is doing the same for coding, making the process reductive and removing technical differentiation.
"I'm going to say something controversial: I don't think developers anymore have good judgment. Developers get to the answer, or they don't get to the answer, and that's what agents have done. The 10x engineer used to have better judgment than the 1x engineer, but by making everybody a 10x engineer, you're taking judgment away. You're taking code paths that are now obvious and making them available to everybody.
It's effectively like what happened in chess: an AI created a solver so everybody understood the most efficient path in every single spot to do the most EV-positive (expected value positive) thing. Coding is very similar in that way; you can reduce it and view it very reductively, so there is no differentiation in code."
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From @theallinpod YT channel (link in comment)
Nobody wants to talk about what this headline ACTUALLY means…
“Thousands of CEOs say AI had no impact.”
They’re not saying it because it’s true. They’re saying it so you don’t quit before they’re done with you.
Hiring is frozen at every major company. College graduate unemployment just hit a record. AI budgets doubled this year. Progressive companies like Block and Salesforce have already begun the switch to AI.
They need employees calm. They need employees productive. They need employees to keep showing up and training their AI systems until it’s ready to replace them.
The unemployment armageddon is just around the corner, and no one is paying attention…
Things are about to get VERY interesting.
this quote from Carl Jung hits so hard.
"The world is full of people suffering from the effects of their own unlived life. They become bitter, critical, or rigid, not because the world is cruel to them, but because they have betrayed their own inner possibilities. The artist who never makes art becomes cynical about those who do. The lover who never risks loving mocks romance. The thinker who never commits to a philosophy sneers at belief itself. And yet, all of them suffer, because deep down they know: the life they mock is the life they were meant to live."
They’re taxing half your income while printing unlimited money.
Surveilling everything you do.
Manipulating every market.
And instead of revolting… hundreds of millions of people are watching the Super Bowl.
Bread and circuses never fail.
you wake up and reach for your phone before your eyes focus. scroll through a hundred thoughts that aren’t yours until your own voice sounds like someone you used to know and by noon you’ve consumed more information than your grandparents did in a year but can’t name a single thing that actually moved you. the feed keeps serving up other people’s lives and you keep swallowing them whole, mistaking the fullness for satisfaction when really you’re just bloated on nothing. you’ve become a processing unit instead of a person and the loneliest part is how normal it feels.
If you have a job right now, do everything you can to hold on to it
January layoffs were +205% vs December. This was the worst January since 2009
The market is going to be flooded with well qualified applicants who just lost their jobs
Simple supply and demand tells you that finding a new job or moving companies in this economy is literally going to become 10x harder
New graduates will probably face the worst of it. They have not had the time to build up any real skills and grunt tasks are more easily replaced by AI
Now they will be competing with folks who already have experience and may be willing to take a pay cut in order to keep affording their life in the midst of massive layoffs
Not a great time to be in the job market right now
GOLDMAN SACHS $GS IS TAPPING ANTHROPIC’S AI MODEL TO AUTOMATE ACCOUNTING, COMPLIANCE ROLES
Embedded Anthropic engineers have spent six months at Goldman building autonomous systems for time-intensive, high-volume back-office work - CNBC
Feels surreal to me that you can still walk around an office in 2026 and see rows of white-collar workers editing spreadsheets, reading docs, writing memos.
This will all be gone in two years, just like the human "calculators" of the 1940s. Do they know it?
Reading what the CEO of Anthropic wrote, it is more clear than ever you basically have less than a 5 year window to hyper-gamble your way into elite status or end up a serf for life
We're in the Endgame now.
Claude in Excel is now available on Pro plans.
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