WSJ: “As corporate America looks to redesign the workplace for the AI age, there’s a new kind of team gaining traction: the “pod.” Smaller than a traditional engineering group, pods are designed to move faster to build and iterate on products. They’re also more cross-functional, including not just engineers but also designers and applied scientists. And critically, all that expertise is concentrated in just a handful of human workers (anywhere from one to eight), as well as AI agents. For years engineering teams have been slowly favoring smaller and smaller teams in the name of speed and agility, but the growing capabilities of AI coding assistants and other agents that can potentially reduce the time-to-ship are allowing for even smaller pod-size structures. With AI agents doing more of the actual software development, including coding and testing, it takes fewer human workers to build products at scale.”
Scott Sumner: “The story of the 21st century is the Great Forgetting. We’ve forgotten the new Keynesian critique of activist fiscal policy. We’ve forgotten why nationalism is an evil ideology. We’ve forgotten the lessons of Orwell’s 1984. We’ve forgotten that statist economic policymaking is counterproductive. We’ve forgotten that integrity and competence are important attributes for a politician or media figure.”
Charlie Warzel: “I’ve written previously that one of AI’s enduring cultural impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing their mind. Some of that is attributable to the aggressive fanfare or the way that the technology has been explicitly positioned to displace labor. But lately, I believe, it’s the accelerated nature of the AI boom that’s driving people everywhere mad. Both the conversation around the technology and its implementation are governed by an exponential logic. Intelligence, revenues, capabilities—all of it is supposed to hockey stick, say the boosters. New, supposed breakthroughs are touted but then immediately couched with the reminder that this is the worst the technology will ever be. Because AI systems have bled into every domain of our culture and economy, it’s exceedingly difficult to evaluate the effect of the technology outside of a case by case basis. That you can’t begin to wrap your mind around the AI boom or orient yourself in it is a feature, not a bug, for those building the technology. But for anyone just trying to adapt, it’s difficult not to feel resentful or alienated. Silicon Valley is trying to speedrun the singularity, and it’s polarizing the rest of us in the process.”
FT: “A lot of guff is written about how dull and exhausting small talk can be. In social situations, maybe. But it is an entirely different matter in the office. A large amount of work consists of person A trying to get person B to do something even though both report to person C. Much is gained if A can keep up with B’s latest half-marathon times, and whether they prefer to holiday in Cornwall or Devon. Also, the smartest leaders know that breaking the ice is just one element of small talk. It also offers the chance to learn a lot of useful stuff.”
