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A challenge with this kind of study is that coding agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) only started working really well in late November, which for most people m

by simonw 3mo ago

A challenge with this kind of study is that coding agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) only started working really well in late November, which for most people meant early January due to the December break. General agents (OpenClaw, Anthropic Copilot, ChatGPT "Work") started working even later than that. This category of software may have a much more meaningful impact on work than the mostly-chat systems we were using from 2022-2025. Studies that mainly focus on 2022 to end of 2025 might be missing out on a material uptick in capabilities.

Seattle3503 3mo ago
It does feel like we are in a transition period, and its not clear what conclusions we can draw about any sort of "steady state" yet.
AbsurdCensor 3mo ago
This isn’t the first study showing this though. It’s pretty simple, programmers and IT were severely overhired during the pandemic, there are massive job losses now, and it’s easy to blame AI when in reality there are a lot of economic factors and AI isn’t increasing productivity as much as anyone would think. Maybe the future will change that for very specific things, but I think people should be learning and preparing for that, which isn’t any different than what everyone has been told in every job market since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
- simonw 3mo ago
  I personally hope that AI continues not to result in a noticeable negative impact on employment and that pandemic over-hiring turns out to be the major factor for all of the layoffs. I'm nervous that the studies which show that so far don't seem to be taking the 2026 improvements in coding and general agents into account.
  - Avicebron 3mo ago
    Is this genuine concern or is it stealth-marketing? It's hard to tell when someone is so publicly benefiting off the hype.
    - simonw 3mo ago
      What the heck would I be "stealth-marketing" here? It's genuine concern. I do not want to live in a dystopia where AI results in mass unemployment. That would suck, even for the people who manage to stay employed.
      - Avicebron 3mo ago
        I trust you when you say that. > What the heck would I be "stealth-marketing" here? Cynically, "thought-leaderishness". I've been spending a lot of my time these days outlining why we can't "just make an agent for it" to CEOs who read blogs like yours. They can't distinguish a production system from a quick HTML tool from a guy whose job doesn't depend on it working.
        simonw 3mo ago
        One of the goals of my blog is to help CEOs who read it not make stupid decisions. I aim to be a counter to the breathless LinkedIn hype they are exposed to everywhere else.
        afpx 3mo ago
        Looking foward to the generated images of a CEO riding a toilet
      - 37488484 3mo ago
        [flagged]
      - slopinthebag 3mo ago
        No offense but wouldn’t being an AI booster run contrary to this goal? I imagine being an Ed Zitron type would be more conducive with that, albeit dishonest if you don’t genuinely believe it.
- underlipton 3mo ago
  >programmers and IT were severely overhired during the pandemic 1) I hesitate to believe that losses were disproportionately technical roles as opposed to administrative. 2) Over-hired by what metric? It's well known that hiring never fully recovered after the GFC; was the recruitment post-pandemic just bringing us to parity with where we had been 20 years earlier? Not to say that I disagree with your following point. The AI overspending and the layoff cost-cutting are not in a direct causal relationship; both are rather symptoms of a common corporate pathology.
  - AbsurdCensor 3mo ago
    They were hired at a higher rate than anytime since the 90s. In the US they ballooned by almost 50%. So when you take layoffs in consideration, the US is still has 25% more programmers than it did prior to the pandemic. And looking at the hiring rates and who is getting hired in programming, it looks like companies aren’t hiring entry level basically at all at this point, so shows the market is still over saturated. No wonder coding camps and CS majors are not being pushed any longer because it’s not a great market for them.
    - underlipton 3mo ago
      The hiring rate can be high while companies are still understaffed, and I think that's the case. A US that has 25% more programmers than it did prior to the pandemic is likely still some double-digit or triple-digit percentage short of the number of programmers it SHOULD have in order to house productive businesses that aren't constantly burning through workers (and consequently missing out on the development of deep institutional knowledge). I'm unconvinced that burning capital on data centers and seven-figure ICs was the right move, compared to building a solid and stable workforce.
raincole 3mo ago
Any research on the impact of AI would have been lagging indicators. It's not the researchers' fault[0], but the nature of a field moving at neck breaking speed. Remember there was a paper saying programmers were 20% slower with AI? [0]: well...
- ballsac 3mo ago
  Well… what
- jdlshore 3mo ago
  That early 2025 METR study was particularly interesting because participants self-evaluated themselves as 20% faster, but the measurements showed they were actually 19% slower. All the reports of productivity since then are self-reported, or using questionable measures such as SLOC and PRs, so it’s reasonable to say that productivity improvements are still unknown. Unfortunately, METR hasn’t been able to replicate the study because they couldn’t find enough willing participants.
- wolvesechoes 3mo ago
  > Remember there was a paper saying programmers were 20% slower with AI? Key thing was not that they were X% slower, but that they were slower while being convinced they are faster. Of course, any analogies with the current hype cycle are completely unfounded.
01100011 3mo ago
This. Also I'm finding out that, after being blown away by agent mode lately, non-agent mode still kind of sucks across frontier models. Using GPT and Gemini in non-agent mode is asking for inaccurate information confidently presented as the truth. Turning on agent mode fixed a lot of that for me.
- IshKebab 3mo ago
  I think it's because of the lack of feedback. Humans also can't do much without feedback. E.g. I doubt most people could write 100 lines of code that works first time without even compiling it once.
  - nswango 3mo ago
    Disagree. When tool limitations meant that this was the way people had to work, many people could do this. It was much more inefficient, because it's easier to find bugs after compiling or running the code. But it is perfectly possible.
    - okwhateverdude 3mo ago
      Even more extreme than that, if you were working on a large code base where compiling it took forever, or you needed to rely on a very slow CI pipeline, it became very important to git gud and write shit that worked first time in order to deliver when promised. I'd argue if you've never had one of those moments where you sunk a bunch of time into some changes and it all compiled/worked flawlessly the first time, you're missing out.
    - IshKebab 3mo ago
      > When tool limitations meant that this was the way people had to work, many people could do this. Sorry when have you ever had to write code without being able to compile it? Tools have never been that limited.
  - mmcnl 3mo ago
    Indeed. I wonder how much AI will do in industries with longer feedback loops that are much noisier. I think the field of software is a unique field in that sense.
majormajor 3mo ago
Anecdotally I'm seeing a lot more recruiter activity/interest now than this time last year. But it seems more correlated with hype-cycle-stage than anything else. Right now a lot of founders seem to be convincing a lot of VCs that they can make $LOTS by replacing/changing $BIG_INDUSTRY/$BIG_PRODUCT with an agent-first blah blah replacement, and then using that money to hire more people to manage/execute/coordinate the coding agents... Last year, by comparison, there seemed to be a mood of "software will stay the same but will require less people" while right now there's a lot of hype around "we can build different types of software or build it in different ways" and those early-stage things are in growth-mode. That guarantees nothing about how many people they'd need in the future, or their success at all, ofc. The news that I'm getting from contacts in non-startup-land is a bit different - still layoff threats. Still pressure to use AI tools more. Mixed confidence on whether or not longer-running "agent" modes are that much more effective-without-breaking-things in legacy code if not used with care.
- steve_adams_86 3mo ago
  Is the recruiter activity you see very… Human? I’m getting a lot of emails but when I do my research, it all appears to be bots. I don’t trust any of it and I don’t respond.
ares623 3mo ago
And this is why the labs cannot just "stop training and become profitable". I can't imagine they would like it if studies like this will actually become credible. "Move fast like a blur so people can't see that you have no clothes"
- ballsac 3mo ago
  Bingo.
ballsac 3mo ago
> A challenge with this kind of study is that coding agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) only started working really well in 2026? 5? 4? 3? Heard this one way too many times.
- simonw 3mo ago
  Nobody was saying coding agents started working in 2023 or 2024, because the category was defined by Claude Code which was first released in February 2025.
  - dgellow 3mo ago
    I would say that Aider is what defined coding agents. That was at least multiple months before Claude code. I remember seeing a coworker use aider for a hackathon project Adeline November-December 2024 , and it was already decent and pretty close to the DX we consider coding agents to have
    - CuriouslyC 3mo ago
      Devin and Cline were the original true "agents" IIRC. Aider was the original terminal "agent" but it was't a true agent, it was sort of a hybrid agentic chat, since it had limited recursion ability (3 turns by default) and you had to configure it carefully to make it consistently take multiple turns in a row.
    - simonw 3mo ago
      Aider was missing a key feature: automatically executing code. That write-execute-fix loop was the big unlock. I believe Aider avoided adding that for safety concerns. Claude Code demonstrated that throwing safety to the wing somehow kind of worked out.
- bigstrat2003 3mo ago
  Yep, the goalposts just keep shifting. In reality: they still don't work well, unless you're content with producing low quality work.
qarl2 3mo ago
For whatever anecdotal evidence it's worth - that has been my experience as well. For the first time last December I noticed the harnesses performing like actual workers. Everything impressive has happened in the last six months.
samstokes 3mo ago
However, companies have been using AI as an excuse for layoffs since well before January 2026, which corroborates the study's conclusion. (Source: https://layoffs.fyi/ai-layoffs/ https://layoffs.fyi/ai-layoffs/) There is certainly an uptick starting 2026, but that could be explained either by AI actually causing more layoffs, or by AI becoming an even better excuse for layoffs.
overgard 3mo ago
Anecdotally, I (along with the rest of my team) got laid off from a big tech company at the end of January. The stated reason was "AI", although I think as we all know the real reason was "we overhired in 2022". I managed to get a job by April without putting in a lot of work, though (mostly just listened to recruiters until something hit my fancy). My work experience is good, but I don't know if it's so good that I would be immune to market effects. The company that hired me is still hiring other software developers, and I was told that it took them a long time to find someone with my qualifications. (We use Claude, although so far I haven't seen a lot of AI psychosis like I have in other places.. that was also a big filter in my job search). Long story short, I think narrative of job loss is way overblown. It's more doom trolling from anthropic and openAI and their mouth pieces as far as I can tell.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- b112 3mo ago
  It's so early game, is the real problem. My experience so far, has been that it's barely a junior dev. I've met so many in my career that think reading stackoverflow, or watching a youtube video mysteriously makes them an expert. AI reminds me of this sort. Well anyone can use (prior to AI) a simple linter and learning to code isn't that big a deal. It's learning the pitfalls, the traps, that's the issue. And so far Opus just seems to fall into them again and again. I guess the best way to put it, is that it's not an architect. I sees no big picture, and that's not really a surprise with (compared to a human) an incredibly small context window. When I'm on a project, or working with a codebase, I often have years of "context window". And I have a career of "don't do this" context window. So what I wonder is, will this be resolved? Will that awareness of larger scope be solved? If that happens, we'll be in another ballpark of competency. Some companies have massive codebases. Are these companies slowly gaining rot in those codebases, a swiss cheese effect, which eventually will result in collapse? Because I've worked where a bad hire had just this effect over time. And what I worry about isn't using Claude to speed one up, it's the DEV that uses Claude and just "meh" and submits because it passes regression + other tests, and then a manager or code reviewer uses Claude and "meh" because it's a pass too.
ofjcihen 3mo ago
Well, in addition to that you also have to consider that companies are now paying (increased) API pricing. It would be an understatement to say that my clients in the F100 range are skeptical at best regarding the gains they’ve seen compared to the costs. This has led to many of them instilling dollar limits or demanding proof of increased productivity (not just output) with the implication being if you don’t provide value with it it’s getting taken away. So that is to say, if they aren’t happy with the price now, how will they feel when it goes up again compared to just keeping a certain headcount?
- fuzztester 3mo ago
  >This has led to many of them instilling dollar limits or demanding proof of increased productivity (not just output) They should have done that from the beginning - demanding proof of increased productivity - if that was their goal. otherwise they were not using their brains well enough. And you doubly don't want to work with them, first because they confused output with productivity at first. and second, because they're parroting the productivity metric. You only need one guess for whose pockets the productivity benefits go into. 10 . 9 . 8 . 7 . 6 ...
- andrekandre 3mo ago
  > So that is to say, if they aren’t happy with the price now, how will they feel when it goes up again compared to just keeping a certain headcount? that got me thinking: how are companies expensing ai costs? as personnel expenses or r&d etc?
  - b112 3mo ago
    Oh wow. You just hit something there. There are government programs for R&D where I live. Grants. Tax credits. This sort of thing. I wonder if people are trying to expense to those programs too.
- b112 3mo ago
  When I was a teenager, a friend had an old gas guzzler from the 70s. I live in a rural area. One time, my car broken, he drove to pick me up to go to College. This cost him an extra $40, in today's dollars. No, I'm not joking. That thing ate gas like a dry camel drinks water. This is what Fabel5 feels like. Crazy expensive. 10 minutes work pulled almost $80 is usage credits yesterday. I'd be exceptionally skeptical too, on costs, if I still had the DEV I had last week, but they were also eating that kind of cash on a very-improved, but still used as a linter. For $200+/hr, or ~$400k/year, I'd want to see a tripling of output at least. In a lot of US markets, you can hire 3 junior devs for that. Yes, there are cheaper options. Opus, etc. But it's really over-priced, and frankly I think the real gold now is making open models fully functional. Anyone predicating their business upon tie-in with the big boys is just going to fail, hard.
cineticdaffodil 3mo ago
The true scottsman period only started, everything before was just scotty junior.
weatherlite 3mo ago
> This category of software may have a much more meaningful impact on work than the mostly-chat systems we were using from 2022-2025. Mostly an impact on software development - I'm not seeing broad automation and layoffs in industries like law, finance etc. It will gradually happen but due to issues with memory, reliability and long term planning of LLMs there are real barriers. Even in software development - while it has completely transformed the field I don't think many people still believe we won't need devs in 2027 or that their amount will shrink by 50%.
- simonw 3mo ago
  I'm optimistic that coding agents will not obsolete software developers - my own experience is that coding agents have made my work harder, because the scope of projects I can take on has increased. My ideal version of all of this is that nobody loses their job and everyone gets to take on more ambitious projects. I'm not quite naïve enough to assume I'm right about that though!
  - steve_adams_86 3mo ago
    > my own experience is that coding agents have made my work harder, because the scope of projects I can take on has increased Likewise. I find the types of problems I need to tackle and the challenges they represent are actually quite exhausting, too. And the agents unblock me relentlessly so I’m constantly pressed to do relatively difficult things. Either that or code review. I’m hoping it’ll only be an adjustment phase but this is the most challenging my career has been in over a decade.
- danshipt 3mo ago
  If by 50% you mean all juniors/mid-level engineers will not find work, then I agree.
- mmcnl 3mo ago
  I think other industries are late, but also will see less productivity gains. In software engineering agents have the benefit of very short feedback loops that provide extremely actionable insights which allows the agent to very quickly iterate towards the final solution. This is much less the case in other industries such as law and finance I think. The first pass of the agentic loop is usually something that barely works (you don't even get to see it with the latest models). If that first pass is the primary output in other fields with no tight feedback loops, then the productivity boost will be much lower than in software.
kh_hk 3mo ago
And yet I have felt a general code quality decrease and overall enshittification of software products since 2023 when people were already using copilot. Or I am just biased to use that to justify any overengineered piece of shit code with that because I refuse to think any sane person would come up with such contrived code and I am looking at the wrong places.
iLoveOncall 3mo ago
[flagged]
- simonw 3mo ago
  Which of my blog entries contradict what I said here?
  - iLoveOncall 3mo ago
    [flagged]
    - hehehehehehej 3mo ago
      [flagged]
    - simonw 3mo ago
      I don't get it. What point do you think those make? They read to me like an accurate report on the progress of these models and tools. In May 2025 Claude Code could help me debug a WordPress installation. In July 2025 I reported on someone managing to get it to build them a macOS app. I got that working for myself in February 2026 https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/25/present/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/25/present/ Also in July 2025 I was successfully using one of the earliest async cloud environments - Codex Cloud - to scrape websites. By October 2025 the most recent Claude could one-shot a simple Datasette plugin. What changed in November 2025 was that the level of hand-holding needed to get good results dropped to the point that it was no longer credible to deny their utility. > Can't wait for your Summer 2027 comment where you'll claim that coding agents really only became usable in November 2026. Oh! I think I see what happened here. I said this: > coding agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) only started working really well in late November "Working really well" and "only became usable" are not the same thing.
      - Chance-Device 3mo ago
        Your detractors don’t care about the facts Simon, as you’re probably well aware. They’re afraid of LLMs and need to deny that they can do anything well or have any potential to take their jobs. In their world AI never has an impact on jobs, just like AI can never be an equivalent to a human, and the goalposts move every time a goal is scored.
twister2920 3mo ago
> coding agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) only started working really well in late November, sigh reset the clock everyone!
jarek-foksa 3mo ago
> General agents (OpenClaw, ...) started working even later than that. There is nothing special about the OpenClaw thing other than the enormous astroturfing campaign that benefited various "crypto" influencers and other scammers. Anyone who endorses it is either manipulated or trying to manipulate you.
- simonw 3mo ago
  Indeed. That's why I pointed out that OpenAI and Anthropic have entire own provides that serve the same purpose now.

by simonw 3mo ago

Seattle3503 3mo ago

It does feel like we are in a transition period, and its not clear what conclusions we can draw about any sort of "steady state" yet.

AbsurdCensor 3mo ago

This isn’t the first study showing this though. It’s pretty simple, programmers and IT were severely overhired during the pandemic, there are massive job losses now, and it’s easy to blame AI when in reality there are a lot of economic factors and AI isn’t increasing productivity as much as anyone would think. Maybe the future will change that for very specific things, but I think people should be learning and preparing for that, which isn’t any different than what everyone has been told in every job market since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

simonw 3mo ago
I personally hope that AI continues not to result in a noticeable negative impact on employment and that pandemic over-hiring turns out to be the major factor for all of the layoffs. I'm nervous that the studies which show that so far don't seem to be taking the 2026 improvements in coding and general agents into account.
- Avicebron 3mo ago
  Is this genuine concern or is it stealth-marketing? It's hard to tell when someone is so publicly benefiting off the hype.
  - simonw 3mo ago
    What the heck would I be "stealth-marketing" here? It's genuine concern. I do not want to live in a dystopia where AI results in mass unemployment. That would suck, even for the people who manage to stay employed.
    - Avicebron 3mo ago
      I trust you when you say that. > What the heck would I be "stealth-marketing" here? Cynically, "thought-leaderishness". I've been spending a lot of my time these days outlining why we can't "just make an agent for it" to CEOs who read blogs like yours. They can't distinguish a production system from a quick HTML tool from a guy whose job doesn't depend on it working.
      - simonw 3mo ago
        One of the goals of my blog is to help CEOs who read it not make stupid decisions. I aim to be a counter to the breathless LinkedIn hype they are exposed to everywhere else.
        afpx 3mo ago
        Looking foward to the generated images of a CEO riding a toilet
    - 37488484 3mo ago
      [flagged]
    - slopinthebag 3mo ago
      No offense but wouldn’t being an AI booster run contrary to this goal? I imagine being an Ed Zitron type would be more conducive with that, albeit dishonest if you don’t genuinely believe it.
underlipton 3mo ago
>programmers and IT were severely overhired during the pandemic 1) I hesitate to believe that losses were disproportionately technical roles as opposed to administrative. 2) Over-hired by what metric? It's well known that hiring never fully recovered after the GFC; was the recruitment post-pandemic just bringing us to parity with where we had been 20 years earlier? Not to say that I disagree with your following point. The AI overspending and the layoff cost-cutting are not in a direct causal relationship; both are rather symptoms of a common corporate pathology.
- AbsurdCensor 3mo ago
  They were hired at a higher rate than anytime since the 90s. In the US they ballooned by almost 50%. So when you take layoffs in consideration, the US is still has 25% more programmers than it did prior to the pandemic. And looking at the hiring rates and who is getting hired in programming, it looks like companies aren’t hiring entry level basically at all at this point, so shows the market is still over saturated. No wonder coding camps and CS majors are not being pushed any longer because it’s not a great market for them.
  - underlipton 3mo ago
    The hiring rate can be high while companies are still understaffed, and I think that's the case. A US that has 25% more programmers than it did prior to the pandemic is likely still some double-digit or triple-digit percentage short of the number of programmers it SHOULD have in order to house productive businesses that aren't constantly burning through workers (and consequently missing out on the development of deep institutional knowledge). I'm unconvinced that burning capital on data centers and seven-figure ICs was the right move, compared to building a solid and stable workforce.

raincole 3mo ago

Any research on the impact of AI would have been lagging indicators. It's not the researchers' fault[0], but the nature of a field moving at neck breaking speed. Remember there was a paper saying programmers were 20% slower with AI? [0]: well...

ballsac 3mo ago
Well… what
jdlshore 3mo ago
That early 2025 METR study was particularly interesting because participants self-evaluated themselves as 20% faster, but the measurements showed they were actually 19% slower. All the reports of productivity since then are self-reported, or using questionable measures such as SLOC and PRs, so it’s reasonable to say that productivity improvements are still unknown. Unfortunately, METR hasn’t been able to replicate the study because they couldn’t find enough willing participants.
wolvesechoes 3mo ago
> Remember there was a paper saying programmers were 20% slower with AI? Key thing was not that they were X% slower, but that they were slower while being convinced they are faster. Of course, any analogies with the current hype cycle are completely unfounded.

01100011 3mo ago

This. Also I'm finding out that, after being blown away by agent mode lately, non-agent mode still kind of sucks across frontier models. Using GPT and Gemini in non-agent mode is asking for inaccurate information confidently presented as the truth. Turning on agent mode fixed a lot of that for me.

IshKebab 3mo ago
I think it's because of the lack of feedback. Humans also can't do much without feedback. E.g. I doubt most people could write 100 lines of code that works first time without even compiling it once.
- nswango 3mo ago
  Disagree. When tool limitations meant that this was the way people had to work, many people could do this. It was much more inefficient, because it's easier to find bugs after compiling or running the code. But it is perfectly possible.
  - okwhateverdude 3mo ago
    Even more extreme than that, if you were working on a large code base where compiling it took forever, or you needed to rely on a very slow CI pipeline, it became very important to git gud and write shit that worked first time in order to deliver when promised. I'd argue if you've never had one of those moments where you sunk a bunch of time into some changes and it all compiled/worked flawlessly the first time, you're missing out.
  - IshKebab 3mo ago
    > When tool limitations meant that this was the way people had to work, many people could do this. Sorry when have you ever had to write code without being able to compile it? Tools have never been that limited.
- mmcnl 3mo ago
  Indeed. I wonder how much AI will do in industries with longer feedback loops that are much noisier. I think the field of software is a unique field in that sense.

majormajor 3mo ago

Anecdotally I'm seeing a lot more recruiter activity/interest now than this time last year. But it seems more correlated with hype-cycle-stage than anything else. Right now a lot of founders seem to be convincing a lot of VCs that they can make $LOTS by replacing/changing $BIG_INDUSTRY/$BIG_PRODUCT with an agent-first blah blah replacement, and then using that money to hire more people to manage/execute/coordinate the coding agents... Last year, by comparison, there seemed to be a mood of "software will stay the same but will require less people" while right now there's a lot of hype around "we can build different types of software or build it in different ways" and those early-stage things are in growth-mode. That guarantees nothing about how many people they'd need in the future, or their success at all, ofc. The news that I'm getting from contacts in non-startup-land is a bit different - still layoff threats. Still pressure to use AI tools more. Mixed confidence on whether or not longer-running "agent" modes are that much more effective-without-breaking-things in legacy code if not used with care.

steve_adams_86 3mo ago
Is the recruiter activity you see very… Human? I’m getting a lot of emails but when I do my research, it all appears to be bots. I don’t trust any of it and I don’t respond.

ares623 3mo ago

And this is why the labs cannot just "stop training and become profitable". I can't imagine they would like it if studies like this will actually become credible. "Move fast like a blur so people can't see that you have no clothes"

ballsac 3mo ago
Bingo.

ballsac 3mo ago

> A challenge with this kind of study is that coding agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) only started working really well in 2026? 5? 4? 3? Heard this one way too many times.

simonw 3mo ago
Nobody was saying coding agents started working in 2023 or 2024, because the category was defined by Claude Code which was first released in February 2025.
- dgellow 3mo ago
  I would say that Aider is what defined coding agents. That was at least multiple months before Claude code. I remember seeing a coworker use aider for a hackathon project Adeline November-December 2024 , and it was already decent and pretty close to the DX we consider coding agents to have
  - CuriouslyC 3mo ago
    Devin and Cline were the original true "agents" IIRC. Aider was the original terminal "agent" but it was't a true agent, it was sort of a hybrid agentic chat, since it had limited recursion ability (3 turns by default) and you had to configure it carefully to make it consistently take multiple turns in a row.
  - simonw 3mo ago
    Aider was missing a key feature: automatically executing code. That write-execute-fix loop was the big unlock. I believe Aider avoided adding that for safety concerns. Claude Code demonstrated that throwing safety to the wing somehow kind of worked out.
bigstrat2003 3mo ago
Yep, the goalposts just keep shifting. In reality: they still don't work well, unless you're content with producing low quality work.

qarl2 3mo ago

For whatever anecdotal evidence it's worth - that has been my experience as well. For the first time last December I noticed the harnesses performing like actual workers. Everything impressive has happened in the last six months.

samstokes 3mo ago

However, companies have been using AI as an excuse for layoffs since well before January 2026, which corroborates the study's conclusion. (Source: https://layoffs.fyi/ai-layoffs/ https://layoffs.fyi/ai-layoffs/) There is certainly an uptick starting 2026, but that could be explained either by AI actually causing more layoffs, or by AI becoming an even better excuse for layoffs.

overgard 3mo ago

Anecdotally, I (along with the rest of my team) got laid off from a big tech company at the end of January. The stated reason was "AI", although I think as we all know the real reason was "we overhired in 2022". I managed to get a job by April without putting in a lot of work, though (mostly just listened to recruiters until something hit my fancy). My work experience is good, but I don't know if it's so good that I would be immune to market effects. The company that hired me is still hiring other software developers, and I was told that it took them a long time to find someone with my qualifications. (We use Claude, although so far I haven't seen a lot of AI psychosis like I have in other places.. that was also a big filter in my job search). Long story short, I think narrative of job loss is way overblown. It's more doom trolling from anthropic and openAI and their mouth pieces as far as I can tell.

deleted 3mo ago
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b112 3mo ago
It's so early game, is the real problem. My experience so far, has been that it's barely a junior dev. I've met so many in my career that think reading stackoverflow, or watching a youtube video mysteriously makes them an expert. AI reminds me of this sort. Well anyone can use (prior to AI) a simple linter and learning to code isn't that big a deal. It's learning the pitfalls, the traps, that's the issue. And so far Opus just seems to fall into them again and again. I guess the best way to put it, is that it's not an architect. I sees no big picture, and that's not really a surprise with (compared to a human) an incredibly small context window. When I'm on a project, or working with a codebase, I often have years of "context window". And I have a career of "don't do this" context window. So what I wonder is, will this be resolved? Will that awareness of larger scope be solved? If that happens, we'll be in another ballpark of competency. Some companies have massive codebases. Are these companies slowly gaining rot in those codebases, a swiss cheese effect, which eventually will result in collapse? Because I've worked where a bad hire had just this effect over time. And what I worry about isn't using Claude to speed one up, it's the DEV that uses Claude and just "meh" and submits because it passes regression + other tests, and then a manager or code reviewer uses Claude and "meh" because it's a pass too.

ofjcihen 3mo ago

Well, in addition to that you also have to consider that companies are now paying (increased) API pricing. It would be an understatement to say that my clients in the F100 range are skeptical at best regarding the gains they’ve seen compared to the costs. This has led to many of them instilling dollar limits or demanding proof of increased productivity (not just output) with the implication being if you don’t provide value with it it’s getting taken away. So that is to say, if they aren’t happy with the price now, how will they feel when it goes up again compared to just keeping a certain headcount?

fuzztester 3mo ago
>This has led to many of them instilling dollar limits or demanding proof of increased productivity (not just output) They should have done that from the beginning - demanding proof of increased productivity - if that was their goal. otherwise they were not using their brains well enough. And you doubly don't want to work with them, first because they confused output with productivity at first. and second, because they're parroting the productivity metric. You only need one guess for whose pockets the productivity benefits go into. 10 . 9 . 8 . 7 . 6 ...
andrekandre 3mo ago
> So that is to say, if they aren’t happy with the price now, how will they feel when it goes up again compared to just keeping a certain headcount? that got me thinking: how are companies expensing ai costs? as personnel expenses or r&d etc?
- b112 3mo ago
  Oh wow. You just hit something there. There are government programs for R&D where I live. Grants. Tax credits. This sort of thing. I wonder if people are trying to expense to those programs too.
b112 3mo ago
When I was a teenager, a friend had an old gas guzzler from the 70s. I live in a rural area. One time, my car broken, he drove to pick me up to go to College. This cost him an extra $40, in today's dollars. No, I'm not joking. That thing ate gas like a dry camel drinks water. This is what Fabel5 feels like. Crazy expensive. 10 minutes work pulled almost $80 is usage credits yesterday. I'd be exceptionally skeptical too, on costs, if I still had the DEV I had last week, but they were also eating that kind of cash on a very-improved, but still used as a linter. For $200+/hr, or ~$400k/year, I'd want to see a tripling of output at least. In a lot of US markets, you can hire 3 junior devs for that. Yes, there are cheaper options. Opus, etc. But it's really over-priced, and frankly I think the real gold now is making open models fully functional. Anyone predicating their business upon tie-in with the big boys is just going to fail, hard.

cineticdaffodil 3mo ago

The true scottsman period only started, everything before was just scotty junior.

weatherlite 3mo ago

> This category of software may have a much more meaningful impact on work than the mostly-chat systems we were using from 2022-2025. Mostly an impact on software development - I'm not seeing broad automation and layoffs in industries like law, finance etc. It will gradually happen but due to issues with memory, reliability and long term planning of LLMs there are real barriers. Even in software development - while it has completely transformed the field I don't think many people still believe we won't need devs in 2027 or that their amount will shrink by 50%.

simonw 3mo ago
I'm optimistic that coding agents will not obsolete software developers - my own experience is that coding agents have made my work harder, because the scope of projects I can take on has increased. My ideal version of all of this is that nobody loses their job and everyone gets to take on more ambitious projects. I'm not quite naïve enough to assume I'm right about that though!
- steve_adams_86 3mo ago
  > my own experience is that coding agents have made my work harder, because the scope of projects I can take on has increased Likewise. I find the types of problems I need to tackle and the challenges they represent are actually quite exhausting, too. And the agents unblock me relentlessly so I’m constantly pressed to do relatively difficult things. Either that or code review. I’m hoping it’ll only be an adjustment phase but this is the most challenging my career has been in over a decade.
danshipt 3mo ago
If by 50% you mean all juniors/mid-level engineers will not find work, then I agree.
mmcnl 3mo ago
I think other industries are late, but also will see less productivity gains. In software engineering agents have the benefit of very short feedback loops that provide extremely actionable insights which allows the agent to very quickly iterate towards the final solution. This is much less the case in other industries such as law and finance I think. The first pass of the agentic loop is usually something that barely works (you don't even get to see it with the latest models). If that first pass is the primary output in other fields with no tight feedback loops, then the productivity boost will be much lower than in software.

kh_hk 3mo ago

And yet I have felt a general code quality decrease and overall enshittification of software products since 2023 when people were already using copilot. Or I am just biased to use that to justify any overengineered piece of shit code with that because I refuse to think any sane person would come up with such contrived code and I am looking at the wrong places.

iLoveOncall 3mo ago

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simonw 3mo ago
Which of my blog entries contradict what I said here?
- iLoveOncall 3mo ago
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  - hehehehehehej 3mo ago
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  - simonw 3mo ago
    I don't get it. What point do you think those make? They read to me like an accurate report on the progress of these models and tools. In May 2025 Claude Code could help me debug a WordPress installation. In July 2025 I reported on someone managing to get it to build them a macOS app. I got that working for myself in February 2026 https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/25/present/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/25/present/ Also in July 2025 I was successfully using one of the earliest async cloud environments - Codex Cloud - to scrape websites. By October 2025 the most recent Claude could one-shot a simple Datasette plugin. What changed in November 2025 was that the level of hand-holding needed to get good results dropped to the point that it was no longer credible to deny their utility. > Can't wait for your Summer 2027 comment where you'll claim that coding agents really only became usable in November 2026. Oh! I think I see what happened here. I said this: > coding agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) only started working really well in late November "Working really well" and "only became usable" are not the same thing.
    - Chance-Device 3mo ago
      Your detractors don’t care about the facts Simon, as you’re probably well aware. They’re afraid of LLMs and need to deny that they can do anything well or have any potential to take their jobs. In their world AI never has an impact on jobs, just like AI can never be an equivalent to a human, and the goalposts move every time a goal is scored.

twister2920 3mo ago

> coding agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) only started working really well in late November, sigh reset the clock everyone!

jarek-foksa 3mo ago

> General agents (OpenClaw, ...) started working even later than that. There is nothing special about the OpenClaw thing other than the enormous astroturfing campaign that benefited various "crypto" influencers and other scammers. Anyone who endorses it is either manipulated or trying to manipulate you.

simonw 3mo ago
Indeed. That's why I pointed out that OpenAI and Anthropic have entire own provides that serve the same purpose now.