The part that isn't about tools: what AI is doing to careers, why the adoption gap is a skills gap, and the quieter problem of judgement that erodes when it goes unused. Patin's own view is that this is the part worth protecting deliberately.
34 posts · 15 guides and explainers
Six months of AI CEOs reversing, hedging, or flatly contradicting their own jobs and AGI predictions haven't changed what's worth building this week. Here's the one decision that stays the same no matter which number turns out right.
5 min readA viral Hacker News essay, a tripled university failure rate, Anthropic's own usage dashboard, and OpenAI's internal delegation data didn't coordinate with each other — but read together they describe the same mechanism, and the same early check for catching it.
5 min readThe jobs debate argues about whether roles disappear. That's the wrong unit. Jobs are bundles of tasks, and AI is redistributing the bundle — here's how to work out which of your tasks move and which don't.
5 min readTool-specific knowledge expires within a year. The skills underneath it don't. Here's how to tell which is which, so you invest in the half that's still worth something next spring.
5 min readStanford data shows entry-level jobs in AI-exposed roles have fallen 16% since 2022. At companies investing heavily in AI, they're up 12%. The gap isn't about industry or budget — it's about one question: are we using AI to cut costs or build capacity?
4 min readSkills decay when they go unused, and AI makes it easy to stop using several at once. That may be a fine trade — but it should be a decision, not a drift. Here's how to choose deliberately.
5 min readProfessional judgement was built by years of doing work that AI now does in seconds. Nobody misses that work — but the training it provided was real, and something has to replace it.
6 min readThree studies published in the same week show that how you use AI determines whether it sharpens or erodes your judgment. Turkish students scored better with AI help and worse without it. BCG consultants followed AI errors they would normally have caught. Taipei students who used AI as a tutor gained six to nine extra months of learning.
5 min readThe productivity gap between professionals using the same AI tools is enormous, and it isn't explained by tool access, seniority, or technical background. Four habits account for most of it.
5 min readJosh Comeau watched an expert developer triple their output with AI and watched beginners spend three hours prompting a model to solve something they fixed manually in 30 seconds. The difference wasn't the model. It was what each person brought to it.
4 min readYour enthusiast and your sceptic are both right, and treating either as the problem costs you the other. Here's how managers handle the conversation without producing quiet non-compliance.
6 min readMost people report AI making them more productive. Many of the same people report feeling more drained. Both are true, and the reason is what AI removes from your day versus what it adds.
5 min readThere are now two populations in every organisation: people whose understanding of AI is current, and people whose mental model is 12–18 months out of date. They're making decisions together. Andrej Karpathy named the problem this week. Here's how to tell which side you're on — and what to do about it.
6 min readBeing excellent at making something doesn't make you good at assessing it — they're different skills with different failure modes. Here's what changes when your job quietly becomes evaluation.
5 min readCompanies over-delegating cognitive work to AI are eroding the human skills that made them competitive. The risk isn't replacement. It's atrophy.
7 min readSam Altman says people who understand their industry but can't code are now positioned to build. Two other signals from the same week explain what that claim leaves out, and what to do about it.
5 min readLenny Rachitsky's 6,000-person survey found the workforce splitting along an AI skill fault line — not access, not tools, but whether you've built the workflows that let AI amplify rather than overwhelm. Here's what the amplified 49% are doing differently.
5 min readCAIS and Scale AI tested 240 real freelance projects against AI agents. The results show a fast-growing gap between tasks AI handles end-to-end and tasks it still breaks on. Here's how to read the data for your own work.
4 min readLenny Rachitsky surveyed ~6,000 tech workers. 82% say AI makes them more productive. Burnout rose from 44.7% to 55.7% year-over-year. The gap between those two numbers is where a lot of people are quietly living right now.
4 min readAnthropic launched a usage dashboard that asks 'What's one thing you want to keep doing yourself, even if Claude could do it faster?' It's the first time a major AI provider has built overuse prevention directly into its product.
5 min readA quarter of OpenAI employees now run four or more agents simultaneously each week. The people doing it most effectively are domain experts, not engineers — and as delegation grows, the risk of losing the ability to judge the output grows with it.
5 min readOn June 16, OpenAI launched its Partner Network with $150M and a December target of 300,000 certified AI consultants, backed by Accenture, BCG, McKinsey, and PwC. What professionalisation means for professionals who have been learning on their own.
5 min readOn June 17, Altman, Amodei, and Hassabis sat together at the G7 summit and gave their clearest AGI timeline estimates yet. What that means for professionals still treating AI skill-building as optional.
5 min readDario Amodei's 15,000-word essay said AI may cause permanent job displacement. The press release that followed the same day created 1,000 paid roles for people who can help organizations adopt it. The skills those roles need are learnable now.
4 min read35.3% of Berkeley CS 10 students received failing grades in Spring 2026, up from under 10% historically. The pattern that caused it — using AI to skip the thinking rather than do the thinking — shows up in professional work too. Here's how to avoid it.
5 min readSam Altman and Dario Amodei reversed their most alarming AI jobs predictions in the same week. The data underneath the reversals is more specific — and more actionable — than the headlines.
5 min readAnthropic's founders went on The Oprah Podcast and told millions of non-technical listeners to stop fearing AI and start learning it. The harder question — the one the podcast couldn't answer — is what to actually do first.
5 min readMeta watched employees work across Gmail, GChat, and internal tools — then laid off 8,000. The lesson isn't about surveillance. It's about what AI cannot learn from watching you, and why that tells you exactly where to put your effort.
4 min readAnthropic's CEO flipped his forecast: the 10% AI can't automate doesn't shrink — it expands to fill your whole role. The catch is that most people haven't identified their 10% yet. Here's how.
4 min readA developer's post about losing his coding skills after two years of AI-assisted work hit 541 points on Hacker News. The pattern he described isn't a developer problem. It's a professional skills problem — and there's a three-question test for catching it before it catches you.
5 min readAnthropic's CEO spent most of 2025 warning AI could eliminate 50% of entry-level knowledge work. On May 5 he invoked the Jevons Paradox instead. When the person building the tool revises his own worst-case prediction, the signal isn't reassurance — it's a timestamp on a window that's still open.
5 min readDario Amodei says 50% of white-collar jobs gone. Yann LeCun says 5–10%. Nobody knows the real number — but every data point agrees on one thing: demonstrated AI skill is replacing résumé prestige as the hiring filter.
4 min readSam Altman published a 13-page policy document calling for a four-day workweek. You can disagree with every proposal in it and still need to run the audit it implies: which day of your current week disappears if the hours shrink?
5 min readBCG analysed 165 million US jobs. Only 10 to 15 percent face elimination — but 50 to 55 percent are being substantially reshaped. Here is the conversation that data should trigger with your manager this month.
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