Peter Rex

@PeterMallouk Important to fall back on your own well-reasoned, independently formed perspective, especially when the environment gets pessimistic. If you let political drama dictate your moves, you’re just reacting to noise instead of the underlying economics

“If you mix politics with your investment decisions, you’re making a big mistake.” – Warren Buffett

@randgroup This is a massive imbalance in supply and demand. Most people don't get that the real estate market behaves differently than the stock market. Stocks crash fast, like air out of a balloon, but real estate dies a slow declining death.

💥 BREAKING: The American housing market is entering its death spiral. 2 million sellers fighting over 1.3 million buyers. Prices haven't adjusted yet.

Exactly. AI augments workers, it doesn't replace them. One person can now build what used to take a full team, flipping the script on mediocre engineers who used to be lazy and smug. Engineering is becoming a pure knowledge game where you build w common language instead of esoteric code.

Marc Andreessen just coined a term that perfectly describes what's actually happening to programmers right now and it's the opposite of what the doomers predicted (Save this). He calls them AI vampires. Andreessen's says that programmers using Codex, Claude Code and AI coding tools are not being replaced but they're working harder than ever, sleeping less than ever, with massive bags under their eyes and they are completely euphoric. What's remarkable is that the phenomenon extends far beyond professional engineers. Andreessen described an a16z partner who had never written a single line of code in his career, who built an entire AI powered work system for himself and when asked if he'd ever looked at the underlying code, the answer was simply "hell no." The data behind the anecdote is extraordinary. Andreessen says the leading-edge programmers at a16z portfolio companies are now 20x more productive than they were a year ago, the most dramatic increase in programmer productivity in the history of the industry. The METR May 2026 AI usage survey found technical workers self reporting a 1.4–2x change in work value from AI tools, with 75% of software engineers using AI for at least half their work. The software engineer hiring rate is actually increasing up to 22.77% of new hires in 2025 from 19.32% in late 2023 and companies are now bidding more aggressively for senior engineers specifically because AI empowered engineers have a higher ROI than ever before. The US economy added 115,000 jobs in April 2026 alone, beating the 62,000 consensus forecast precisely as AI adoption hit its highest level on record. This is exactly what basic economics predicts and what almost no one who writes about AI and jobs bothers to say. Classic marginal productivity theory says: when you increase the productivity of a worker, you don't diminish human work, you expand it. The worker becomes more productive, gets paid more, does more, and more jobs are created in the process. Andreessen's ATM analogy holds here because ATMs were supposed to eliminate bank tellers but instead, teller employment rose because lower operating costs let banks open more branches. The no-code AI market has exploded from $4.3 billion in 2023 to $21.2 billion in 2026 not because programmers are being replaced, but because the universe of people who can now build software has expanded by orders of magnitude. The blind spot, as Andreessen notes, is that productivity is now outrunning comprehension. The a16z partner building AI systems he's never looked at the code for represents something genuinely new, software being summoned faster than it can be understood. That's not necessarily dangerous but it does mean the verification, security, and governance layer of the AI development stack is more important now than it has ever been.

@philrosenn 💯

@PeterRex it's true

The biggest technology companies in the world are being explicit about how early the AI boom really is. Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Meta are putting trillions of dollars into making AI "too big to fail."

@JOEBOTxyz One could argue AI is actually showing us what’s most core to being human, like reasoning and creativity

Opposition to AI is a profound human reaction. It is beyond partisan talking points. AI is an imposition. A deeply unpopular one.

@unclebobmartin Engineering is becoming a pure knowledge game. Coding aint going away, but it's flipping from building by hand to commanding AI to find "compressed routes" through problems.

Authoring code by hand HAS GONE AWAY. Engineering module structure and architecture has not.

@EXM7777 Yep, that's why imo its better to write your own content & utilize AI for brainstorming, getting informed, editing, etc

writing good content with AI is mostly an unteachable skill... 90% of it is screen time: just generating, reading, throwing away, rewriting, generating again you build an instinct for what a model does when it's bored, what it does when the prompt is vague, what it does when you over-explain... none of that lives in a guide humanizing tools patch the surface the people who actually sound human just spent 6 months staring at outputs until the slop became obvious

@signulll Definitely a point to be made here in rent vs own debate in housing

overtime you realize every thing you own is a small tax on your attention. maintenance, storage, insurance, repairs.. all kind of take up precious bandwidth even if you delegate it or whatever. in the past ownership used to mean freedom because the world was scarce. if you wanted access, you had to basically possess. but the modern world has been kinda redesigned around rent where you can rent anything.. incl. people, places, objects, taste, labor, entertainment.. all available on demand with a tap of a button. why would you own a car when there is uber? why would you have a vacation home when you can stay at anything you desire? why would you allocate capital anywhere other than markets where it actually compounds?

@MartinGTobias Exactly, this is how you build something great. Find whatever exists but has room to be perfected, as you already have a market that is likely frustrated it isnt.

The richest man in the world didn't invent software. The greatest football player in history didn't invent a new sport. The greatest musician of all time didn't invent an instrument. Find a game that already exists and become the best at it.

Spot on. AI raises the floor for the mediocre, but the ceiling is gone for those w exceptional judgment. Most are focused on the slide decks while others are finding compressed routes to brute force things that used to take teams. It’s showing us what is actually core to being human

i don’t think people understand how weird this is getting. like actually weird, not “new app feature” weird. for years everyone talked about ai as if it was just a bigger engine. more chips, more data, more power, more money. stack enough metal in a desert and eventually the machine gets smart. but that’s not what it feels like anymore. the uncomfortable part is that the models seem to be finding structure in places we didn’t know had structure. little cracks in the wall. compressed routes through problems that looked impossibly expensive from the outside. things that were supposed to need absurd scale are starting to appear in systems that, on paper, should not be able to do them. and the stranger part is that nobody has a clean explanation for all of it. not really. you talk to people close to the work and the mood is not “we solved intelligence”. it’s more like “something in there is doing more than our diagrams say it should”. planning behavior, hidden abstractions, weird transfer between domains, tool use that looks less like following instructions and more like building a private map of the task. the old forecasts assumed intelligence would arrive like a construction project. slow, expensive, measurable, with clear milestones. instead it’s starting to look like we accidentally found a lever. and while all this is happening, the public conversation is still stuck on whether ai is good for homework or whether it can make prettier slide decks. brother, the slide decks are not the story.

@QueenMab87 Keep doing those things, but important to figure out how to use them with AI. Those who are good at these things have a massive advantage in the AI world

I’ve never quite understood how I’ll get “left behind” if I don’t use AI. I’m perfectly capable of writing, researching, and thinking all on my own. What does it do that will leave me behind?

@petergyang Exactly right. AI raises the floor for the mediocre but the ceiling is gone for those w exceptional judgment. People will crave craft.

I feel like AI gets people to average quickly but if you really know your shit (or you actually care enough to go the extra mile) you’ll be more in demand than ever because people will long for craft in a sea of slop

Anyone claiming they're a seasoned expert in a tech that’s changing by the hour is probably lying or selling something. Real edge isn't in those enterprise guardrails... it’s in brute forcing the tech into operations until it actually works. If the 'soul' is being sucked out, you’re likely just automating the wrong stuff

I spoke to five Fortune 2000 execs today about the state of AI. I asked each one “What’s the most challenging part about this moment in AI?” The CISO said: “There is an ocean-sized gap between hype and reality, which makes discerning what’s real exhausting.” The VP of AI engineering said: “Everyone acts like they’re an expert, yet the main reason so few AI use cases have reached production in enterprises is because true expertise requires experience in scaled systems, enterprise politics, AI fluency, governance and guardrails, and deep process knowledge. Almost no one is actually an expert.” The CTO said: “Our remit is to cut costs, but you can’t actually take AI transformation seriously without increasing AI/R&D budgets up front to ultimately drive bottom line once things are in production and performant. It’s an unrealistic expectation.” The Chief of Staff said: “My job is to drive AI upskilling across the organization, and after doing it for 2 years I’m exhausted. Yes there’s potential ROI from all of the agentic workflows we’re building, but soul and humanity are being sucked out of our processes.” The Finance leader said: “We acquired a multibillion dollar old school business. Getting that business to be AI-native is incredibly painful largely because people aren’t ready or willing to adopt it.” I’m having convos like this every day because I'm building an invite-only AI community for enterprise execs (and interviewing folks before I let them in), but if you find these notes helpful I’m happy to keep sharing them!

It's now becoming fairly damn obvious that "not everyone needs to go to college". What's perhaps less obvious but quite obvious if you look closely is that colleges are not really a place for higher learning, where students leave with a wonderful education after four years and can speak broadly on literature, philosophy, theology, etc. or at least be a highly technically trained person who may not be well-educated but at least is highly useful. Colleges are four years of dithering, stockpiling debt, losing whatever discipline mommy taught you.

@jean_twenge Why I homeschool my kids. System stopped teaching folks how to actually read and think yrs ago. Data is finally catching up to what parents have been watching for a while now

Reading scores, 3rd graders to 8th graders, 2015 to 2025. This is a national tragedy.

@pmddomingos lol. But yes real new ideas come from folks who lived a problem long enough to see it differently. Most people and most AI are just rearranging whats already out there

AI can’t generate new scientific ideas, but neither can most scientists.

Real estate doesnt crash like stocks. It dies slow. Death blow hit July 2022, were still in the middle of a multi-year decline thats far from done The part most folks arent seeing yet: Fewer buyers means more renters, but no new builds are getting pencil'd in. Rental supply crunch coming up

@jonbrooks Real estate doesnt crash, it dies slow. Death blow hit July 2022... Still working thru it years later. Frozen now, but the back end is gonna be a rental supply crunch most arent seeing yet

Existing home sales just hit the lowest April level since 2009. Think about how insane that is. Higher inventory. Falling rents. Massive affordability crisis. Builders slashing prices and buying down rates. But the headlines still say: “Housing market remains resilient.” No. The market is frozen.

@NewsLambert @ResidentialClub Cheap credit era catching up w folks. Plenty of households were leaning on cards just to keep up w prices, and the math is breaking

Credit card stress is at Great Financial Crisis levels—even though the national unemployment rate is still under 5.0% There’s a segment of the U.S. consumer that appears completely TAPPED OUT Chart via @ResidentialClub