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Long-form thinking from our work in AI, software, infrastructure, and product development.

Hiring AI-Assisted Developers, Revisited

In December 2022, I predicted the end of the Junior developer role and the rise of the "AI Prompter." Four years on, I grade those predictions against what actually happened: junior employment down ~20%, the prompt engineer title born and buried, the unit of work shifted from prompt to delegated task. And a new thesis — the junior of 2026 is a supervisor of unlimited cheap labor, hired for verification, specification, and judgment. This is not the endpoint; the next revision comes in six months.

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Weekly AI landscape

As of mid-to-late August 2026, the AI landscape is marked by rapid model releases, a strong emphasis on agentic capabilities (coding, tool use, long-horizon tasks), and Chinese labs dominating open-weight/open-source progress while Western providers iterate on proprietary frontiers. Chinese models frequently match or approach top closed models on coding/agent benchmarks at far lower cost, with massive download numbers and permissive (or near-permissive) licenses.

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