Why Are Coding Agents So Dumb?
Lynch started with coding agents in February 2025 and expected agents to catch up with the models within six months; he says they did not.
10subtasks OpenCode created for a 1.5k-line feature, then ran one by one
Future of work
Week 41 · 5-11 Oct
23 sources filed · EN 20 · ZH 3
B B When software is cheap as milk, what do we deliver? (EP52)
A two-week iteration cycle (spec, design, build, test, release, measure) now takes a team of one or two people half a day.
30+products Guo Yu built alone with coding agents in roughly three to four months, many unreleased
A Can AI automate Epoch?
Task suite: 11 tasks in five categories; models tested on Codex, Claude Code, Grok Build, Antigravity, Kimi Code and Qwen Code at their highest reasoning settings.
11 tasksreal Epoch work tasks across five categories in the launch suite
A AI Adoption and Employment Expectations: Evidence from a Survey of Small Business Owners
46% of firms with at least one employee use AI tools; another 15% plan to within 12 months.
33 vs 15 ppnet share expecting higher employment next 12 months, AI users versus non-users
A AI-Assisted Submissions in Online Research Are Rare and Highly Concentrated but Routinely Approved
Survey of 2,500 workers: 11.31% said they had ever used AI on a Prolific submission when asked directly; an anonymous list experiment estimated 14.24%.
1.00%share of 712,930 Prolific submissions with observed ChatGPT assistance
A Dual- vs Single-Suggestion AI Support for Radiographic Interpretation in Residents: Randomized Multireader Study
154 residents assessed, 132 randomized 1:1:1, 123 analyzed (mean age 24.1, 65 women; 60 radiology, 63 non-radiology), all with under 3 years of experience.
40.1% / 40.4% vs 20.0%radiology residents' accuracy on cases where GPT-5.4 was wrong, with two AI suggestions vs one
A When My Skill Becomes Agent Skill: How Knowledge Workers Share Their Expertise with AI Systems
61 full-time, college-educated US professionals in HR, people management, sales or marketing, randomly assigned to an AI or human recipient.
76.7% vs 96.8%share of professionals who authorized reuse of their materials by AI systems versus by human professionals (p = .026)
S Still waters, rapid currents: Early labor market transformation under generative AI
43% of workers in the 11 occupations work for employers that explicitly encourage chatbot use; 6% are prohibited.
2%largest average effect on earnings or hours that the estimates still allow, for workers and workplaces
A Understanding Interfirm AI Talent Flow Networks through Online Professional Profiles
Data: about 535 million employment records across 58 countries; the US AI network in 2022 covers 2,255 firms, with the most connected firm linked to 711 partners.
73.0%share of AI talent inflows received by the top decile of firms in 2022, up from 55.8% in 2010
A When the Commons Appropriates an LLM: How WikiVault Reshaped Korean Wikipedia
In ten months, 55 editors used WikiVault (0.12% of 49,080 active editors), yet they created 7,607 of 68,642 new pages (11.10%) and 220,028,216 of 813,680,042 added bytes (27.00%), from 0.63% of edits.
55editors who used WikiVault in its first ten months (0.12% of active editors)
A Capital-Skill Complementarity Beyond Firm Boundaries (w35857)
After a machinery investment spike, purchases from suppliers raise total demand for high-STEM workers by 45%, three times the rise for other skill groups; in-house hiring raises it by less than 5%, evenly across groups.
45%rise in investing firms' total demand for high-STEM workers via supplier purchases after a machinery spike
B Global Workforce Report: AI Is Rewriting Jobs More Than It's Cutting Them
40% of business leaders expect AI to help them get more out of existing employees; 28% expect it to reduce headcount.
-25%fall in job-posting demand for basic AI skills such as simple prompting after a January 2026 peak
A How Heavily Are PhD Students Offloading Their Scientific Writing to AI? Evidence from US STEM PhD Dissertations (w35859)
Share of dissertations with AI-generated abstracts: 1.7% (2023), 5.5% (2024), 18.8% (2025), 29.4% (2026).
29.4%2026 US STEM dissertations with AI-generated abstracts (filed through May 2026)
A What Did the AI Take On? Characterizing Cognitive Delegation in LLM Reasoning
24 frequent LLM users (12 female, 12 male, mean age 25.75) produced 992 retrospective annotations of reasoning steps and tool actions.
48.6%share of LLM reasoning steps users judged as AI-initiated, work they had not asked for
B The hottest AI job, FDE: 50k RMB a month, here's the work
FDE Pulse puts the median annual salary of overseas FDE roles with public pay at about $200,000 (about RMB 1.34 million); Chinese firms advertise RMB 30-50k per month.
~$200,000median annual salary of overseas FDE roles with public pay, per FDE Pulse (about RMB 1.34 million)
C DeepSeek hiring for elastic compute; DSec sandbox report
One DSec shard: about 160 servers, 30,000 CPU cores and 250 TB of memory, serving about 3 million sandboxes per day; peak of more than 380,000 concurrent sandboxes and more than 5,000 created per second.
380,000+sandboxes online at the same time at peak, with 5,000+ created per second
B Revelio Labs Reports 56.9k US Jobs Added in September as Pace of New AI Adoption Falls 48% From Spring Peak
56.9k jobs added in September, led by Public Administration and Health Care and Social Assistance; Information and Transportation declined.
48%fall in the number of firms newly adopting generative AI from the April 2026 peak
B The Challenger Report: September 2026 job cuts
September cuts: 43,281, down 18% from 52,881 in August and 20% from 54,064 in September 2025.
120,1362026 year-to-date job cuts attributed to AI, about 21% of all cuts and the leading reason
A Right Order, Wrong Scale: Auditing LLM Judges for Occupational AI Measurement
ONET-Bench is built from 45,796 worker ratings of AI responses to ONET-derived tasks; the test split has 4,501 ratings.
3.0%-97.9%share of responses LLM judges rated acceptable, versus 61.1% for occupation-matched workers
A Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2026
64% of workers used AI at work in the past 12 months, up ten points; daily GenAI use rose from 14% to 22%; 59% expect their AI use to increase.
64%workers who used AI at work in the past 12 months, up ten points year-on-year
A Has AI impacted the labor market yet?
Brynjolfsson et al. (ADP payroll): 13% fall in junior employment in high-exposure roles by July 2025; dashboard shows 19% below trend by June 2026, roughly halving with education controls.
19%employment of 22-25-year-olds in high-exposure US roles below trend by June 2026 (Canaries dashboard, descriptive)
S Workforce in Motion: Skills and Pathways to Future Jobs in the United States
About 36 million US jobs see reduced demand by 2035; about 41 million are created elsewhere.
about 11 millionUS workers (roughly 7% of the workforce) who would need to leave their occupations by 2035 in the base case
A The Early Impacts of AI on Employment among Recent College Graduates (w35796)
Summer (June-August) unemployment for graduates aged 22-25: 7.1% (2022), 6.3% (2023), 7.8% (2024), 7.2% (2025), 7.3% (2026).
7.3%summer 2026 unemployment of college graduates aged 22-25, within the 6.3-7.8% range of 2022-2025
September 2026
1 source filed · EN 1
A Will AI Help or Hurt Work and the Economy? What People Around the World Expect (CESifo WP 13006)
Share of workers expecting AI to facilitate their work ranges from 42% to 86% by country; threat ranges from 18% to 46%.
42% to 86%range across countries of workers expecting AI to facilitate their work
June 2026
1 source filed · EN 1
S AI at Work: Why Strategy Matters More Than Tools
Regular AI use (daily or several times a week): frontline 74% (51% in 2025), managers 88%, leaders 93%.
74%frontline employees who are regular AI users, up 23 points from 2025
May 2026
3 sources filed · EN 3
A 2026 Work Trend Index: Agents, human agency and the frontier firm
In a sample of about 105,000 Copilot chats from one week in February 2026, 49% of user goals supported cognitive work (analysis, decisions, problem solving); 19% interacting with others, 17% producing work, 15% finding information.
19%AI users in the Frontier zone, where individual capability and organisational readiness are both high
C Rearchitecting workflows: how-to guide
Only 1 in 4 AI users say their organisation has clear and consistent leadership alignment on AI.
32,200+ hourstime saved in Microsoft Cloud Supply Chain after workflow redesign and agents
B Reflections and New Directions for Human-Centered LLMs
A physical-activity coaching case (GPTCoach and the Bloom app): expert coding found over 93% of the coach's conversational strategies were consistent with motivational interviewing or neutral, though gaps against skilled human coaches remained.
5xincrease in app usage time with the LLM coach versus a no-LLM control, while physical activity stayed comparable (N=54, four weeks)