We’re using AI to move faster. I’m not yet convinced we’re using it to work better.
AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It
One of the promises of AI is that it can reduce workloads so employees can focus more on higher-value and more engaging tasks. But according to new research, AI tools don’t reduce work, they consistently intensify it: In the study, employees worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day, often without being asked to do so. That may sound like a win, but it’s not quite so simple. These changes can be unsustainable, leading to workload creep, cognitive fatigue, burnout, and weakened decision-making. The productivity surge enjoyed at the beginning can give way to lower quality work, turnover, and other problems. To correct for this, companies need to adopt an “AI practice,” or a set of norms and standards around AI use that can include intentional pauses, sequencing work, and adding more human grounding.
AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less
If you lived through the shift from handcrafted server pets to immutable infrastructure, you should sense something oddly familiar about what's happening now.
AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It
Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye from Berkeley Haas School of Business report initial findings in the HBR from their April to December 2025 study of 200 employees at a …
Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.
Something Big Is Happening
A personal note for non-tech friends and family on what AI is starting to change.
I don't know if I like working at higher levels of abstraction
AI tools push us to higher abstraction. I'm not sure I like what that costs us.
How does AI impact skill formation?
Two days ago, the Anthropic Fellows program released a paper called How AI Impacts Skill Formation. Like other papers on AI before it, this one is being treated as proof that AI makes you slower and dumber. Does it prove that?
Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t
Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kappor take on the question of AI job losses through the lens of a profession that is uniquely suited to AI disruption - software engineering. In …
When AI builds itself
Our progress toward recursive self-improvement, and its implications.
AI and the Fall? of the Creative Class
America is Losing Hundreds of Thousands of Jobs in Media, Film & the Arts. How Much is AI to Blame?
Is AI causing a repeat of Frontend’s Lost Decade? | Mastro Blog
AI is doing to programming what framework-brain did to the frontend before. Deskilling, or just working at a higher level of abstraction?
The machines are fine. I'm worried about us.
On AI agents, grunt work, and the part of science that isn't replaceable.
Women Who Use AI Seen As Incompetent; Men Who Use AI Seen As Pragmatic
A 2026 study found that when women and men use AI tools to create identical resumes, evaluators view the women as less competent, while crediting the men with initiative.
The New Software Lifecycle
I co-wrote a Google whitepaper about how AI is changing the software lifecycle. I'm not going to summarize the whole thing. Instead, here are the handful of ...
Everybody needs a personal AI policy. Just ask Hank Green.
How can we reap AI’s benefits without melting our brains in the process?
More Than a Tool
What We Learned from a Year of Conversations About AI
