In The Loop

Hand the same AI tool to two people and one gets sharper while the other quietly gets worse. A Harvard study found recruiters given near-perfect AI made worse calls than those given a mediocre one, because the good tool worked so well they stopped checking it. The question of whether AI is making us dumber turns out to have an answer: it depends entirely on which parts of your job you hand over. I...

Open LinkedIn and count the posts that start with "in today's fast-paced world." Check your inbox for someone circling back to delve into synergies. The AI slop is coming from every direction now. People can tell, and they mark down what reads like a machine wrote it. The fix isn't a cleverer prompt. It's that the model has never actually read your writing. In this episode of...

Every summer since 2023, AI gets a panic season — critics say that AI's novelty i novelty's wearing off, the models have hit a wall, ninety-five percent of projects fail. Each time it dominates for a few months, then dissolves. This year's arrived early, kicked off by Uber burning through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months with a COO who can't prove it was worth it. But 2026&...

Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic on 19 May 2026. Most people read it as an OpenAI story — he co-founded the lab, left twice, and landed at the rival. That's not what this is. Eight weeks before he made the call, Karpathy built a 630-line Python script that ran 300 experiments on his own code in two days and found improvements he'd missed after months of hand-optimizing. He called it "the final bos...

Americans now say they'd rather live next to a nuclear reactor than an AI data center. That's not a fringe view — a Gallup poll published this month found 71% of Americans oppose a data center near their home, versus 53% for nuclear. Nuclear carries Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and forty years of films about radiation in the cultural zeitgeist. The fact that AI data centers have only been a visib...

In 1971, Boeing laid off 44,000 engineers in 18 months. The aerospace industry is still paying for it — they're projecting a shortage of over a million engineers by 2030, and the cohort that would now be the senior bench was simply never hired. Last year, S&P 500 companies cut 400,000 jobs — the first net decline since 2016 — and the specific pattern of who's being cut, and why, looks...

Y Combinator have just published a playbook for building a company that runs on AI rather than just using it. Six principles, written by a general partner who works with hundreds of the very best leading AI-native startups every year. The reason its gone viral so fast is that it named something a lot of people had been watching happen without quite having the language for. In this episode of In Th...

The gap between casual Claude users and people getting ten times more out of it isn't prompt craft. It's a folder. This is the basis of a personal AI operating system. Andrej Karpathy posted his "LLM Knowledge Wiki" in early April and kicked off a wave of people rebuilding their note systems — not for themselves, but for the agent. This episode is the architecture they all converge on, the master...

Most AI spending right now is measured in tokens consumed. Jellyfish tracked 12,000 developers across 200 companies and found the heaviest users produced twice the output at 600 times the cost. Uber's internal numbers are even worse: 70% of submitted code was AI-generated, but only 11% of the code running in production was AI-written. So almost all of that AI code never made it into their app....

On Wednesday, the US Treasury Secretary and the chair of the Federal Reserve called an emergency meeting with the CEOs of America's largest banks. Not about interest rates. Not about inflation. About an AI model. Anthropic built something that finds and exploits security flaws in virtually any software it's pointed at — bugs that the best human researchers in the world had missed for decad...

OpenClaw became the fastest-growing open source project in history by showing people what an always-on AI agent could actually feel like. The problem is it requires a dedicated machine, technical setup, and a high tolerance for an agent that can access everything on your computer. Over the past month, Anthropic has shipped essentially the same capabilities — scheduling, remote control, computer us...

Jensen Huang stood in front of a Morgan Stanley audience and called OpenClaw "probably the single most important release of software, probably ever" — arguably more important than the web browser, Linux, and the iPhone OS. It went from a side project by one Austrian developer to the stated foundation of Nvidia's entire enterprise agent strategy in a matter of weeks. That claim is sel...

Skills are the fix for most of your problems using AI tools. And right now they're one of the most powerful and most underused features in the entire Claude ecosystem. In this episode of In The Loop, I'm going deep on Claude Skills: the context engineering principle underneath them, the exact anatomy of a skill file, how to build your first one from scratch, how skills chain together into...

Anthropic just dropped a labor market report with a chart you need to see. It maps what AI could theoretically do across every major occupation against what it's actually doing. The gap is enormous. In computing and math, AI could theoretically handle 94% of tasks. Observed usage? 33%. Legal hits nearly 90% theoretical — real-world usage barely clears 20%. This week on In The Loop, I break dow...

A UC Berkeley study spent eight months inside a real tech company watching how people actually used AI. The finding? Workers worked more, not less. They took on broader responsibilities, blurred the line between work and rest, and filled every freed-up minute with more tasks. Nobody told them to. The tools just made stopping feel like waste. In this episode of In The Loop, I'm breaking down wh...

Anthropic turned down hundreds of millions of dollars and said no to the Pentagon. Less than 24 hours later, OpenAI signed the deal. Both companies claim identical principles, but one drew a line in the contract and one didn't. That difference might be everything. In this episode of In The Loop, I'm breaking down the full story behind the Anthropic-Pentagon fallout: the internal memos, the red lin...

The job market just had its worst month since 2009. Over 108,000 layoffs were announced in January alone (a 120% increase year-on-year), and AI was directly cited in thousands of them. But the real shift isn't about who's being replaced. It's about what skills actually matter now. In this episode of In The Loop, I break down the new skill sets emerging in the AI era — taste, judgment, curiosity, a...

Over a trillion dollars has been wiped from software stocks. Traders are calling it the SaaS Apocalypse, and the sell-off is only accelerating. In this episode of In The Loop, I break down why markets are panicking, what happens when the cost of creation collapses to near zero, and what software actually becomes on the other side of this shift. ⏭️ Episode Highlights (01:46) – What's actually happe...

AI already consumes more electricity than some countries. By 2030, it'll double, equivalent to adding another top-ten energy-consuming nation to the planet. So Elon Musk merged his AI company with his rocket company, creating a $1.25 trillion entity that just filed to launch a million data centre satellites into orbit. The FCC filing literally quotes the Kardashev scale. In this episode of In...

Over 150,000 AI agents have joined Moltbook—a social network where humans can only watch. Within 48 hours, these agents founded a religion, built a pharmacy, debated consciousness, and started encrypting messages to hide activity from us. This happened the same month bot traffic officially surpassed human traffic online for the first time. In this episode of In The Loop , I'm breaking down wha...

Anthropic just launched Claude Cowork—the same powerful agent behind Claude Code, now accessible to everyone without touching a terminal. In this episode of In The Loop , I break down how this desktop tool manages local files, controls browsers, and runs parallel AI tasks. I walk through practical examples—from organizing receipts to building custom folder-based agent systems—and explain why this...

A year ago, building clever chat interfaces was strategic work. Now, it's just table stakes. Most SaaS products now offer some sort of chat interface—so how can you gain a competitive advantage in 2026? In this episode of In The Loop, I'm sharing my top ninepredictions for 2026, starting with why differentiation has moved away from the interface layer.  I'llsI'll walk through where...

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OpenAI just dropped GPT-5.2, and it's their most focused release yet. No AGI promises this time—just real improvements for professional work. In this final episode of 2025, I break down what actually matters about this release. You'll learn about the three model versions (Instant, Thinking, and Pro Extended Thinking), massive context window upgrades, and genuine breakthroughs in spreadshee...

OpenAI just declared Code Red. But here's the twist: three years ago, it was Google in crisis mode. When ChatGPT launched, Google's founders came back to pull all-nighters, teams were reassigned overnight, and it felt like the beginning of the end for Google's dominance. Now the tables have turned. In this episode of In The Loop , we explore why OpenAI faces the a code-red crisis—talen...