R.A. Spencer

Using Claude Code has a weird side effect: You don't just get more productive, you actually want to work more. There's something addictive about watching a product being born in real time in front of your eyes. "One last feature" after "one last feature" and it's already past 3am.

The jobs apocalypse is the Population Bomb of our time. Instead we're seeing more hiring in the job most affected by AI: programming. That should have been clear and obvious to anyone with basic economics understanding and good handle on the history of technology but it's sadly lacking today. Fear sells. It drives clicks. It drive engagements. The jobs apocalypse scenario comes from catastrophizing personalities and people who think of life as a zero sum game. It's the same mistake the communist theorists made. They thought jobs and labor were fixed and there's nothing new under the sun. If we take one job that job is lost forever and that person is now useless. Wrong. Instead, what happens is that when something gets faster and cheaper we want more of it. Much more. There is so much software that we could not build before because there weren't enough skilled people and not enough time and it wasn't worth the time or money. Now it is worth it because it is faster and cheaper. Cheaper for SaaS builders, cheaper for individuals, cheaper for enterprises, cheaper for everyone. That's why were are seeing programmer jobs tick upwards. Right now we are not seeing juniors get hired but that is also always the case in a recovery. We just saw mass layoffs because of overhiring during COVID and cheap money printing that made lending essentially free. The unskilled, aka junior workers, are always the last hired. You want skilled verterans who can take on the new technology with experience and take off running not someone you have to train and babysit when you have been stuck in third gear for a few years. Job populists on the hard left like Sanders and many of his mirrors on the populist hard right are the enemies of actual working economies and must be resisted at all costs. They hurt the very people they hope to help by clinging to the past and thinking of life as a zero sum game. This increase in jobs is the reality that will increasingly play out over the next few years if AI keeps getting better, barring some other economic shock that changes the game. It will increasingly play out even when we have "geniuses in a datacenter." It will be a shock to some. Just not the jobs shock they were expecting. Sorry to disappoint but we're not getting UBI any time soon while the robots do all the jobs and you sit on your ass. Seems like we are all going to have to work a bit longer.

If you want to be an innovator, you have to be comfortable looking stupid for a long time. You’re going to piss some people off and you’re going to get a lot of nos. That’s the only way to start having valuable breakthroughs.

Today we're launching local scheduled tasks in Claude Code desktop. Create a schedule for tasks that you want to run regularly. They'll run as long as your computer is awake.

This is an extremely important point and touches on some of the most important questions to tackle: What new work may emerge? And how fast? And how do we support those contending with disruption during the transition?

It’s extremely good that Anthropic has not backed down, and it’s siginficant that OpenAI has taken a similar stance. In the future, there will be much more challenging situations of this nature, and it will be critical for the relevant leaders to rise up to the occasion, for fierce competitors to put their differences aside. Good to see that happen today.