This is some really interesting data.

In a new paper, several Stanford economists studied payroll data from the private company ADP, which covers millions of workers, through mid-2025. They found that young workers aged 22-25 in “highly AI-exposed” jobs, such as software developers and customer service agents, experienced a 13 percent decline in employment since the advent of ChatGPT. Notably, the economists found that older workers and less-exposed jobs, such as home health aides, saw steady or rising employment. “There’s a clear, evident change when you specifically look at young workers who are highly exposed to AI,” Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson, who wrote the paper with Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen, told the Wall Street Journal.

Source: The Evidence That AI Is Destroying Jobs For Young People Just Got Stronger →

This is some fascinating research.

Researchers at Oxford University and King’s College London tested LLMs using game theory, giving LLMs from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic prompts that mimicked the setup of the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma.

They found that Google’s Gemini is “strategically ruthless,” while OpenAI is collaborative to a “catastrophic” degree. Their paper, published on the preprint repository Arxiv (and not yet peer reviewed), claims that this is due to OpenAI model’s fatal disinterest in a key factor: how much time there is left to play the game.

Source: Gemini Is ‘Strict and Punitive’ While ChatGPT Is ‘Catastrophically’ Cooperative, Researchers Say →

Don’t let the clickbait title put you off. Related to my link about AI killing jobs in tech, here Cal Newport produces some compelling “both sides” receipts about how AI is helping + hurting software development. His conclusions are solid:

My advice, for the moment:

1. Tune out both the most heated and the most dismissive rhetoric.
2. Focus on tangible changes in areas that you care about that really do seem connected to AI—read widely and ask people you trust about what they’re seeing.
3. Beyond that, however, follow AI news with a large grain of salt. All of this is too new for anyone to really understand what they’re saying.

AI is important. But we don’t yet fully know why.

Source: No One Knows Anything About AI →

I think we’ve all seen the internal Shopify memo on requiring teams to use AI. This is a great article on what happened next. I especially love the internal tools Shopify built to make adoption easier:

Employees can use the LLM proxy to build the workflows they need. They can select from different models, which are updated with the latest versions as soon as they’re released. There’s a collection of MCPs, and all it takes is asking the proxy (or another tool like Cursor) to access them. There’s even a stable of agents already created by other people for anyone to use. It’s a one-stop shop for everything someone needs to use AI.

Source: From Memo to Movement: Shopify’s Cultural Adoption of AI →

This was a very comprehensive survey about everything from AI tools to Terminal app preferences, CI/CD systems, and more. Very much worth the click to skim through the results. Gergely also has an interesting theory on why developers hate Jira so much:

But I wonder if the root problem is really with JIRA itself, or whether any project management tool idolized by managers would encounter the same push back? It is rare to find a dev who loves creating and updating tickets, and writing documentation. Those who do tend to develop into PMs or TPMs (Technical Program Managers), and do more of “higher-level”, organizational work, and less of the coding. Perhaps this in turn makes them biased to something like JIRA?

Source: The Pragmatic Engineer 2025 Survey: What’s in your tech stack? →

Some of the charts here are a little hard to parse, but this is pretty incredible.

In the top panel, you can see that in the 1960s, only around 14% of children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia survived at least five years. Despite initially improving upon treatment, most relapsed and died soon after. By the 2010s, the chances of survival had increased dramatically: 94% of children survived at least five years.

Source: Childhood leukemia: how a deadly cancer became treatable →

Great list of resources here by Pete Steinberger:

These resources will help you master the new paradigm of AI-assisted development, where agents become true collaborators that can handle entire codebases and ship production features. Each piece was chosen for its practical, real-world insights.

I especially appreciate that it’s a combination of articles (yay!) and videos (not for me!), and that he provides a nice overview of each so you can decide if you want to click through or not. Excellent curation, would recommend!

Read Essential Reading for Agentic Engineers ↗

This take on the Pocket shutdown resonates with me real hard:

“What began as a read-it-later app”, they assert, “evolved into something much bigger.” That was the whole problem: the mistake that led ultimately to this “difficult decision” by Mozilla. Pocket was a good tool. Its integration with Kobo, another excellent tool, made it that much more valuable to users like me. We didn’t need “something much bigger”. But by trying to turn Pocket into something much bigger, Mozilla actually killed it.

I feel like nothing has changed since I wrote about this kind of thing in… 2012:

This is the core of the disappointment that many of us feel with the Sparrow acquisition. It’s not about the $15 or less we spent on the apps. It’s not about the team’s well-deserved payout. It’s about the loss of faith in a philosophy that we thought was a sustainable way to ensure a healthy future for independent software development, where most innovation happens.

→ Some Products Just Aren’t Big Companies