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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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"

> 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.

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.

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/) 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.

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.

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?

Use it in your favor.

You just have to get past the recruiter/talent acquisition where everyone else is getting auto-rejected. You should be doing that anyway.

> Companies asking for 4 years of agentic AI experience… pardon?

Not that I am trying to excuse it, but this is not a new thing, nor specific to AI.

Job listings that ask for X years of experience where X years is sometimes literally longer than the technology has even existed has been a staple complaint of developers over my entire career, and I'm old af.

> In my workplace, we're going to decline to renew some software subscriptions because a non-programmer vibe-coded their replacement in a week. The impacts are here, they're just not evenly distributed yet.

Interesting to see the impact in the long term when battle tested software gets replaced with vibecoded variants by non-programmers. Does it increase data breaches or quality actually goes up?

Or the amount of software increases tremendously