Big tech is culling the engineers of 2035

Firstly, I can't not mention the culmination of the rich-guy-sues-rich-guy story...so in a nutshell, Musk’s $150bn OpenAI case appears to have ended not in a grand argument about not-for-profits or AI safety, but with the legal equivalent of Musk missing the bus (it seems he filed his lawsuit a tad late).

Talking of missing buses, it seems that soon, graduates won't even be able to afford one.

Big tech is at it again. Graduate recruitment has fallen by more than 50% since 2019. Entry-level job postings are down 35% and a Harvard study published this year found firms integrating AI saw junior headcount fall by roughly 9% versus peers. The numbers are not ambiguous about what's happening.

We've all thought it - entry-level work isn't about the cheap labour layer, it's the apprenticeship layer. You learn to write production code or write awful press releases by writing bad production code and prose under supervision, then fixing it. Remove that layer and you don't just get a leaner org chart, you get a pipeline where the senior folk in 2035 simply don't exist, because nobody let them be terrible in 2026.

Google noted last year that AI now generates more than 25% of its code. Engineers direct and review the output, which sounds like a promotion until you ask what those engineers are drawing on to know when the AI is 'confidently wrong'.

Let's Data Science ↗

The Human Side of AI

I started using Claude Code out of curiosity and four weeks later, I knew what a grep was, had developed strong feelings about merging and commits, and was building tiny, pointless tools for problems no functioning adult would admit to having.

This is not really a piece about coding. It is about the middle-aged man finally finding a machine that delivers small wins that bizarrely delivers big on satisfaction.

Read the full essay →

Have AI Got News For You!

• Anthropic says AI isn't replacing workers. It's changing what they do all day. - Business Insider. At 90% code generation, white-collar work shifts from execution to supervision, creating new exhaustion without job security. Read ↗
• Artificial intelligence job screeners prefer AI-written resumes over human ones, researchers find - New York Post. AI hiring systems favour their own outputs, forcing job seekers into AI-generated writing to pass automated gates. Read ↗
• I used AI to help market my bagel shop. Then the one-star reviews came in. - Business Insider. Customers punished authentic small businesses for using AI marketing, revealing real backlash against synthetic authenticity. Read ↗
• AI Made Everyone a Builder and That's a Problem. Low friction creation floods ecosystems with unmaintained projects and spam, degrading the commons AI builders depend on (seemed topical - clearly I disagree). Read ↗
• Who doesn't want a robot wolf?. Just weird so I couldn't resist. Read ↗