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Reporting and discussion about AI & Work, with links to the original sources.
The inner-loop thesis holds that AI advantage may lie in how fast organizations ship, measure and learn, not in the best model.
Updated Sep 14, 2026 IdeaThe Coasean singularity asks what happens to firms if AI agents make deals nearly free.
Updated Sep 9, 2026Erik Bernhardsson, CEO of AI infrastructure company Modal, says code review there is optional and backed by heavy automated testing, and that Modal doesn't hire product managers. He also lists the costs of roughly 4x growth in a year.
Modal CEO Erik Bernhardsson says coding agents trained on old examples keep writing outdated Modal syntax, so it retires features more cautiously. Modal also tests whether agents recommend it and clarifies pricing content they misread.
Moshi CEO Anekha Sokhal argues that when AI lets anyone build a tool, the hard part is getting others to use it, and that Spotify-style push may help. She described an engineer whose requested tool sits unclicked in colleagues' email.
Tenex, which builds AI systems for large companies, says it stores plans, agent decision logs and project context beside its code so agents can read them. In the episode, Tenex said Opus 5.5 is the main coding model for most of its team, and that pairing it with Codex as a reviewer still gives the best results.
Tenex co-founder Alex Lieberman says paying engineers per agreed story point has left its top earner making about 4x its lowest, short of a 10x "dream." With output roughly doubled this year by a rough Tenex estimate, it reviews points quarterly.
Alex Lieberman, co-founder of AI consultancy Tenex, estimates that of roughly 100 large companies it talks to, 90% have given staff Claude or Codex but only about 5% run an agent in production for non-engineering work.
Eric Weinstein called universal basic income "cancer" and proposed that workers hold a saleable right to their labor market, licensing it to employers who import labor or use AI. He did not say how license prices would be set.
Sean Wang, known as swyx, says engineers who manage coding agents well are in more demand than ever. He says two or three of his own staff are under performance review for handing him low-quality output from Claude.
OutSystems CEO Woodson Martin expects to still have 100-plus phone apps a year from now. He sees a real chance that much software becomes widgets inside AI conversations, and cited a June demo that moved a loan request from Claude into a bank app.
OutSystems CEO Woodson Martin says AI makes feared legacy rewrites feasible, while self-built AI dashboards create cleanup work. He says customer gains take time to reach profits and that deciding what to build is still the hardest part, even though building capability has improved.
Astro Teller, who leads Alphabet's X, said executives prefer a 1-in-100 shot at $1 billion to a sure $1 million but say their bosses would never back it, so bold projects need a protected space where their mess is tolerated.
Astro Teller of Alphabet's X said the cost of getting each moonshot to graduation is down about threefold in 16 years, partly thanks to AI. Alexander Wissner-Gross said that just tracks economic growth; Teller rejected the comparison.