Scott Stirrett

Excellent opinion piece in the Globe & Mail about the need - and desirability - of much closer ties between Canada and Australia. Both Commonwealth countries with strong democracies, tons of vital mineral deposits, and more. theglobeandmail.com/business/comme… #Canada #Australia

When Canada and Australia team up, nobody can stop us theglobeandmail.com/business/comme…

@erikbryn Why do you think there is such a divergence between US productivity growth and many other developed economies?

US productivity growth is likely to come in at about 2.7% for 2025. That is nearly double the average of the previous 10 years. There are many factors at work, but part of the story is that businesses are finally beginning to reap some of AI's benefits. I discuss the latest evidence in my column in the @FT this morning. See ft.com/content/4b51d0…

The FT just quantified what the “vibe code is a toy” crowd has been ignoring for 12 months. New websites up 30%+ YoY. iOS app submissions up nearly 60%. GitHub pushes in the US and UK spiking to levels never seen in the data. All four charts show the same inflection point: late 2024, right when Claude, Cursor, and Replit Agent hit mainstream adoption. The scale of what’s happening is hard to overstate. 25% of Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 batch reported codebases that were 95% AI-generated. Replit says 75% of its users now have zero coding background. A solo founder built Base44, sold it to Wix for $80M cash after six months. Lovable raised at a $6.6B valuation and is targeting $1B in annual revenue by late 2026. This is real shipping. Real apps in the App Store. Real websites with real domains. The skeptics kept framing vibe coding as “demo code that never sees production,” and meanwhile the production numbers were quietly going vertical. The part most people skip: this data probably understates the shift. Tons of internal tools, prototypes, and MVPs built with AI never touch GitHub or the App Store. They live inside companies, replacing processes that used to require a dev team and a 6-week sprint. Collins Dictionary made “vibe coding” their Word of the Year in 2025. When the dictionary notices before the industry analysts do, you know the discourse is lagging the data by about 18 months.

@jburnmurdoch Interesting take Canada would be an interesting use case to look at as Quebec doesn't use common law whereas the other provinces do

Underrated factor in why English-speaking countries have especially bad housing crises is their common law systems (adversarial and litigious) vs judge-led civil law systems elsewhere. Makes Anglo planning/permitting systems especially vulnerable to NIMBYs and other objections.

“Roughly 35 percent of Canadians aged 20 to 34 lived with at least one parent in 2021. Meanwhile, the share of 20 to 34 year olds living with a spouse, partner and/or child without their parents has declined from almost 50 percent in 2001 to under 40 percent in 2021.”

Fascinating insights from senior engineers on how AI is changing their jobs. Interesting how automation also creates all sorts of new tasks and bottlenecks. thoughtworks.com/content/dam/th…

The transformation of Toronto, Canada 🇨🇦

I think this was a really bad year for American politics, a mediocre year for the American economy, and an exceptional year for America. In 12 months, you’ve got - the largest decline in murder rate ever recorded - huge declines in traffic fatalities, drug overdoses, and suicide - first ever personalized gene editing treatment and breakthroughs in HIV and cancer therapy - continued advances in GLP1 technology that seems to reduce weight and inflammation and a bunch of other stuff - declines in teen anxiety and despair - surge in self-driving car technology* - all this happened in a period when both the SP500 and inflation adjusted median wages hit record highs

Most divides aren't due to differing values. They're driven by focusing on different things. After a 10-minute talk, people with opposing views are less polarized a week later. They find more common ground than expected. Prejudice festers in silence. Civil dialogue opens minds.

French is one of the most information efficient languages in the world ! But the real fascinating but is that all languages end up sharing information at a similar pace, independently of how quickly it is spoken.

Fei-Fei Li says the ability to learn and adapt now matters more than degrees Structured credentials matter less than how quickly an engineer adopts new tools to boost output "at this point in 2025, i wouldn't hire a software engineer who doesn't embrace AI-collaborative tools"

The hot new job at tech companies is leading "storytelling." The term doubled on LinkedIn job posts in the U.S since last year. The WSJ writes: "Compliance technology firm Vanta this month began hiring for a head of storytelling, offering a salary of up to $274,000." "Productivity app Notion recently merged its communications, social media and influencer functions into one 10-person, so-called storytelling team." "Financial technology brand Chime last month began hiring for a director of corporate editorial and storytelling—its first storyteller opening." As a former reporter and career-long content/brand leader, I have some thoughts! These examples point to a shift in internal marketing orgs that reflect a shrinking earned media landscape and an endless, growing number of distribution channels to share and own your narrative, i.e. "going direct." It's not entirely editorial, or events, or PR, or marketing. It's how all these pieces work together and how they contribute to the bigger picture - your story! I joke with my reporter friends that they are infinitely hireable if they ever left journalism. Why? Because we are trained to ask: "So what? Why should readers care? What does it mean for them?" To me, that's a big nuance in this conversation. Because... *Storytelling is a human act and it's a service.* Super interested to watch what happens here. Are you long/short on this role?

@craigmod's Things Become Other Things has been the perfect travel companion for me on my five week trip to Japan. Next trip I want to visit the Kii peninsula!

This is the real platform play by Anthropic. They are going shopping aggressively for dev tools. Buying dev tool startups is the natural move if you want to turn Claude into the house brain for entire engineering orgs. There's a race to own the coding stack where the cash actually shows up.

Among the most successful early models I have seen for organizations restructuring for AI right now is to build small, high-agency, cross-functional teams (eg senior engineer, subject matter expert, great product manager) and allow them to experiment & build useful things quickly

So it starts, the transformation of education In a bold move, Anthropic and the Ministry of Education and Children of Iceland are launching one of the world’s first nationwide AI-education pilots: hundreds of teachers across Iceland will gain access to the AI tool Claude, educational resources and training to explore how AI can transform lesson preparation and student learning. A win-win situation for Anthropic

this is an insane chart