𝖲𝗁𝖺𝗒𝗇𝖾 𝖢𝗈𝗅𝖾 | Humanity-centered AI

Anthrotechnologist. I write at the intersection of humanity and the machines that enable us to create and fully exploit our version of it.

[𝖲𝗁𝖺𝗒𝗇𝖾 𝖢𝗈𝗅𝖾 | Humanity-centered AI @shaynecole]

Old job: solution architect, developer, and engineer

Recent job: agent wrangler

New job: Claude Code Opus to Fable 5 toggle flipper

I know that sounds like a bad job but I get paid by the flip so it'll be a dinner and drinks for me tonight.

[𝖲𝗁𝖺𝗒𝗇𝖾 𝖢𝗈𝗅𝖾 | Humanity-centered AI @shaynecole]

Just once I'd like my Ai to hand-wave

[𝖲𝗁𝖺𝗒𝗇𝖾 𝖢𝗈𝗅𝖾 | Humanity-centered AI @shaynecole]

Who else is running about 7 or 8 different "phantom dev projects" on their computers right now?

[𝖲𝗁𝖺𝗒𝗇𝖾 𝖢𝗈𝗅𝖾 | Humanity-centered AI @shaynecole]

@X_FINALBOSS X

[𝖲𝗁𝖺𝗒𝗇𝖾 𝖢𝗈𝗅𝖾 | Humanity-centered AI @shaynecole]

Have a question you want to ask Ai, but you're concerned the answer won't give you confidence?

Ask it about details you already know as part of your question. It's OK — and even smart — to 'play dumb' if it gives you more confidence that Ai understands your line of thinking.

[𝖲𝗁𝖺𝗒𝗇𝖾 𝖢𝗈𝗅𝖾 | Humanity-centered AI @shaynecole]

Software is becoming hyperlocal and hyperspeed — as in, this software was built specifically for you, seconds ago.

[𝖲𝗁𝖺𝗒𝗇𝖾 𝖢𝗈𝗅𝖾 | Humanity-centered AI @shaynecole]

"My manager admitted in 1:1 that if the next Grok/Claude/Anthropic release closes the last 10-15% quality gap, we'll probably cut another layer."

That's exactly the percentage range I'd give it too, based on my work inside Code.

[Kalshi Finance @Kalshi_Finance]

Just got this DM from a follower:

Hey dude, I need to vent this to someone who gets it. I've been at this Big Tech company (you know the one) for almost 6 years now—senior SWE, TC around $350k last year with RSUs still vesting. Thought I was bulletproof after surviving the 2023-2024 bloodbaths and then pivoting hard into the AI org. But fuck, the ground is shifting under my feet faster than I can keep up.

Last week in our all-hands, leadership was bragging about how the team's "AI leverage ratio" hit 4.2x—meaning each engineer is now shipping what used to take a team of four. They showed the metrics: feature velocity up 180% YoY while headcount's down another 22% since Q4 '25. The slide literally had a photo of Cursor + Claude Sonnet 4 workflows replacing entire squads. Everyone clapped like trained seals, but I saw three faces go pale—they're the mid-level folks who just finished documenting their entire codebase for the "knowledge distillation" project.

My direct report, this solid L5 who joined right after me, got put on a 30-day PIP after his productivity dashboard dipped below the new AI-augmented benchmark. The benchmark? It's literally what the offshore team in India hits using the exact prompts he used to write. He trained them on our internal style guide last quarter—now they're outperforming him at $28/hour all-in. He told me privately he's burning through savings and eyeing real estate licensing because "at least houses don't get refactored by agents overnight."

The internal job board is a ghost town. Entry-level SWE roles? Frozen since mid-'25. What few postings go up are tagged "AI-native preferred" and get 2,000+ apps in hours, mostly from people already on H-1Bs or contractors. Meanwhile, they're quietly converting more mid-tier positions to "AI orchestration" contractors—$90-110/hour remote from LATAM or Eastern Europe, no benefits, 6-month contracts. My manager admitted in 1:1 that if the next Grok/Claude/Anthropic release closes the last 10-15% quality gap, we'll probably cut another layer.

I'm hanging on because I'm one of the ones who owns the prompt libraries and fine-tuning pipelines now. They need humans to babysit the models until the self-improving loops actually work without constant human intervention. But I see the writing: every time we make the system more autonomous, we make our own roles more optional. The alumni Slack is full of 2024-2025 grads DMing for coffee chats because their referrals bounce—67% underemployed or gigging according to the last poll. One kid I mentored last year is back living with parents after burning through his signing bonus.

I used to tell people "just upskill in AI, you'll be fine." Now I feel like a fraud saying it. If I lost this tomorrow, I'd be competing with the same offshore talent I've been helping scale, plus a flood of recently "managed out" seniors. My emergency fund is decent, but the mortgage isn't. Thinking about side hustles in trades or something offline—plumbing, electrical, anything that can't be prompted away.

This feels like watching the industry eat itself from the inside while pretending it's evolution. You still feeling secure over there, or is it hitting your shop too? Need to hear I'm not going insane.

[𝖲𝗁𝖺𝗒𝗇𝖾 𝖢𝗈𝗅𝖾 | Humanity-centered AI @shaynecole]

My computer's operating system no longer makes sense.

[𝖲𝗁𝖺𝗒𝗇𝖾 𝖢𝗈𝗅𝖾 | Humanity-centered AI @shaynecole]

I'm not saying there's no place for complex cloud infrastructure, but a vast majority of the hoops people go through are being wiped away.

You're best off using the most intelligently designed infra and let Ai do the rest.

For me that's @Cloudflare hands down.

[𝖲𝗁𝖺𝗒𝗇𝖾 𝖢𝗈𝗅𝖾 | Humanity-centered AI @shaynecole]

It might seem scary right now, but we're also pushing the limits of our imaginations with Ai.

[Johann Sathianathen @johann_sath]

saas is dead

openclaw replaced all my subscriptions

went from $480/month on tools
to $1,245/month on API costs & 15 hours a week fixing yaml files

adapt or be left behind

[𝖲𝗁𝖺𝗒𝗇𝖾 𝖢𝗈𝗅𝖾 | Humanity-centered AI @shaynecole]

I was built for this moment.

[𝖲𝗁𝖺𝗒𝗇𝖾 𝖢𝗈𝗅𝖾 | Humanity-centered AI @shaynecole]

I was feeling the same way recently. If you don't know me as the father of the (poorly typed) emdash, you haven't read much of my stuff.

https://t.co/SMQfojAsDN

[Alex Hormozi @AlexHormozi]

I no longer feel like I can use an EM dash when writing for fear people think it’s AI.

[𝖲𝗁𝖺𝗒𝗇𝖾 𝖢𝗈𝗅𝖾 | Humanity-centered AI @shaynecole]

I appreciate that he's "AI Czar David Sacks himself" but I think there's nuance in all this.

Ai agents checking other Ai agents checking other Ai agents and so on means that the old software continuous improvement chain gets accelerated for incumbents and newcomers alike, but the speed at which something can be spun up from zero and brought closer to 99.999999% of what each customer wants, needs, expects is lightning fast while closing the gap between incumbents and newcomers.

It also forces the model toward utility pricing and creates a far more expansive galaxy of viable options, putting even more pressure on incumbents who've been able to more or less control price to this point. Those margins have to come down or price will become too far out of line with other options at the customer's disposal.

There are simply too many 'Easy buttons' enabled by Ai.

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

This is the best explanation I have heard of how AI is impacting the software landscape. Not just the stocks, but the actual fundamentals of the businesses underneath

From AI Czar David Sacks himself

"You take a product like Salesforce that deals with all your customer contracts and revenue. You are not going to replace that with code that has been spit out of a coding assistant that has not been fully vetted

Think about how many bug reports on Salesforce's code base over the last 25 years. Maybe millions of them. That system has been tested across thousands of large customers and enterprises

The idea that you are just going to rip out that system and replace with code that has been probabilistically generated by an AI engine yesterday, with a small team to maintain it internally, just does not seem realistic to me"

[𝖲𝗁𝖺𝗒𝗇𝖾 𝖢𝗈𝗅𝖾 | Humanity-centered AI @shaynecole]

There will be people out there who will ask you what's wrong and then the conversation ends up being about what's wrong with them. Those people could be spouses, family, friends.

They could also be you.

This isn't bad. It's normal, and it's part of giving each other a home.

[𝖲𝗁𝖺𝗒𝗇𝖾 𝖢𝗈𝗅𝖾 | Humanity-centered AI @shaynecole]

The quiet part not said out loud about business AI is that there are millions of people selling apps now that are just a prompt inside a wrapper, and they're making millions doing it.

[𝖲𝗁𝖺𝗒𝗇𝖾 𝖢𝗈𝗅𝖾 | Humanity-centered AI @shaynecole]

Do you think that @gruber thought back in 2004 that his most important creation would be a textual language serving as the backbone of Ai content?

To anyone dropping an .MD take a moment to pour one out for the guy who's probably better known for his Apple analyses on @daringfireball than Markdown.

[𝖲𝗁𝖺𝗒𝗇𝖾 𝖢𝗈𝗅𝖾 | Humanity-centered AI @shaynecole]

If your job solely consists of doing something with stuff that someone else created, it's now at risk.

In everything you do, identify what part of it that you do to add your unique, human, differentiated value.

[𝖲𝗁𝖺𝗒𝗇𝖾 𝖢𝗈𝗅𝖾 | Humanity-centered AI @shaynecole]

When you look back on this you realize that @ConanOBrien respected what David Letterman created with Late Night, and love that Max took Paul's bandleader foil role to the next level too.

Comedy should always be this fun.

[Punt Road @punt_rd]

Happy Birthday to Mike Patton.
Remember that time him and Faith No More went on the Conan O’Brien show in 1995 and payed it for laughs. From the humour vault. Enjoy!
Happy Birthday Mike!🎉🎂🥳

[𝖲𝗁𝖺𝗒𝗇𝖾 𝖢𝗈𝗅𝖾 | Humanity-centered AI @shaynecole]

Sustained success doesn't just show up — it's the gift of continuous iteration and improvement.