Today's chapter of Agentic Engineering Patterns is some good general career advice which happens to also help when working with coding agents: Hoard things you know how to do https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic…
simonwillison.net
Hoard things you know how to do - Agentic Engineering Patterns - Simon Willison's Weblog
Only 24% of PM candidates have a GitHub. Every PM I placed at OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta AI last year had one. I wrote the first guide on how to build yours: https://news.aakashg.com/p/you-should-bu…
The highest-paying job in tech will soon be marketing.
OpenAI Residency 2026 applications are OPEN btw - 6-month full-time paid research gig in SF - ~$220K annualized ($18.3K/month) + relocation - NO prior ML/AI experience required, just strong technical fundamentals & fast learning - Work on frontier AI with top researchers Interviews starts in Jan 2026 Apply: https://openai.com/careers/residency-202……
Job seekers in the U.S. and many other nations face a tough environment. At the same time, fears of AI-caused job loss have — so far — been overblown. However, the demand for AI skills is starting to cause shifts in the job market. I’d like to share what I’m seeing on the ground. First, many tech companies have laid off workers over the past year. While some CEOs cited AI as the reason — that AI is doing the work, so people are no longer needed — the reality is AI just doesn’t work that well yet. Many of the layoffs have been corrections for overhiring during the pandemic or general cost-cutting and reorganization that occasionally happened even before modern AI. Outside of a handful of roles, few layoffs have resulted from jobs being automated by AI. Granted, this may grow in the future. People who are currently in some professions that are highly exposed to AI automation, such as call-center operators, translators, and voice actors, are likely to struggle to find jobs and/or see declining salaries. But widespread job losses have been overhyped. Instead, a common refrain applies: AI won’t replace workers, but workers who use AI will replace workers who don’t. For instance, because AI coding tools make developers much more efficient, developers who know how to use them are increasingly in-demand. (If you want to be one of these people, please take our short courses on Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and Agentic Skills!) So AI is leading to job losses, but in a subtle way. Some businesses are letting go of employees who are not adapting to AI and replacing them with people who are. This trend is already obvious in software development. Further, in many startups’ hiring patterns, I am seeing early signs of this type of personnel replacement in roles that traditionally are considered non-technical. Marketers, recruiters, and analysts who know how to code with AI are more productive than those who don’t, so some businesses are slowly parting ways with employees that aren’t able to adapt. I expect this will accelerate. At the same time, when companies build new teams that are AI native, sometimes the new teams are smaller than the ones they replace. AI makes individuals more effective, and this makes it possible to shrink team sizes. For example, as AI has made building software easier, the bottleneck is shifting to deciding what to build — this is the Product Management (PM) bottleneck. A project that used to be assigned to 8 engineers and 1 PM might now be assigned to 2 engineers and 1 PM, or perhaps even to a single person with a mix of engineering and product skills. The good news for employees is that most businesses have a lot of work to do and not enough people to do it. People with the right AI skills are often given opportunities to step up and do more, and maybe tackle the long backlog of ideas that couldn’t be executed before AI made the work go more quickly. I’m seeing many employees in many businesses step up to build new things that help their business. Opportunities abound! I know these changes are stressful. My heart goes out to every family that has been affected by a layoff, to every job seeker struggling to find the role they want, and to the far larger number of people who are worried about their future job prospects. Fortunately, there’s still time to learn and position yourself well for where the job market is going. When it comes to AI, the vast majority of people, technical or nontechnical, are at the starting line, or they were recently. So this remains a great time to keep learning and keep building, and the opportunities for those who do are numerous! [Original text; https://deeplearning.ai/the-batch/issue-… ]
"I can imagine the jobs eliminated. I'm not imaginative enough to think of all the jobs that will be newly created. I see a net decline in jobs." @HowardMarksBook says AI is innovating faster than society can adjust, and even if we could adapt, we'll see a significant period of job market dislocation. "There are people who say, 'I have great news, people aren't going to have to work.' To me that's terrible news. We get a great deal from our work other than a paycheck. How are those elements of life going to be replaced?"
Someone asked about tricks for meeting eminent people. I said the best plan is just to do really good work. Then you'll tend to meet them organically. In the worst case you'll see one whenever you look in the mirror.
How to use AI for your next job interview @noamseg (my community research lead) interviewed 30 current and recent job seekers about how they use AI throughout the interview process. What he found went far beyond polishing resumes. People had built entire systems tailor-made for their own situations: ways to get feedback on what they actually said in interviews, methods to predict questions before walking in, workflows to surface stories they didn’t know they had. As he was pulling together a research report from these conversations, he quickly realized that most people on the job market are stressed and anxious enough. The best value he could offer wasn’t a list of tips but, instead, a way to plug-and-play the hard work these participants have already done. So he changed direction, took every interview AI technique that worked for these participants, added a layer of professional coaching techniques, and built a free Claude Code–based coach you can plug-and-play into your interview process today. The coach helps you with every step of the interview process: 1. Scores your interview responses and tells you exactly what to fix, based on what you said, not what you think you said 2. Mines your experience for stories you didn't know you had 3. Runs mock interviews that push back and interrupt you 4. Generates company-specific prep with predicted questions 5. Coaches post-offer salary negotiation with exact scripts and fallback language ...and much more Learn more and grab it here: https://lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-us…
BREAKING: Within the past 72 hours: - Apple's AI Chief steps down - Apple's Head of UI Design leaves to Meta - Apple's Policy Chief steps down - Apple's Head of General Counsel steps down
The scariest thing is in 4-5 years we're going to have kids on peptides, nootropics and Claude Code entering the workforce
Google's ex-CEO Eric Schmidt talks about how his whole early life was basically coding, and how AI just wiped it out. He says in his 20s all he wanted to do was write programs, all the way through college and grad school, and that this is what built his career. But now, every single thing he learned back then can be done by AI. "Each and every one of you has a supercomputer and superprogrammer in your pocket." --- From 'Institute of Politics Harvard Kennedy School' YT channel
It took me two years to get 1M plays. Now we get 1.2M plays per day on 20VC. Most people fail because they give up. This is a game of who can survive the longest.
You never really know how news like this is going to land. The response over the last 24 hours has been overwhelming. Thank you for the messages, the stories, and the kind words about how Starter Story impacted you. It might take me a month to read them all. When you’re in the day-to-day, you forget to zoom out and see how many people were part of the journey. I underestimated that. THANK YOU.
It’s easier than ever to write code… And yet the hard parts of software engineering are still *very hard* Don’t get discouraged by the hype. There’s still so much to learn and build.
“The thing that will differentiate you more in your career than anything else is being the most hyper-curious person.” - @bgurley “If you are the most curious person constantly learning in your field, you will do extremely well.” “I can’t make you the most talented person in your company or your field, but you have no excuse not to be the most knowledgeable person. The information is all out there.”
You want to make a lot of mistakes, but not the same mistake twice