The Five Levels: from Spicy Autocomplete to the Dark Factory – Dan Shapiro's Blog

In my last post, I wrote about technical deflation. We’re seeing the cost of code is dropping so fast that we need to change our tech debt payment plans. The smart teams…

100 years of whatever this will be

What if all these weird tech trends actually add up to something? Last time, we explored why various bits of trendy technology are, in my o...

Microsoft reports are exposing AI's real cost problem: Using the tech is more expensive than paying human employees | Fortune

Companies are racing to incentivize employees to use AI. But as some companies are finding, the more employees that use the technology, the heavier the bill.

Big Tech’s A.I. Spending Is Accelerating (Again)

Despite the risk of a bubble, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon plan to spend billions more on artificial intelligence than they already do.

More! More! More! Tech Workers Max Out Their A.I. Use.

At a number of companies, employees compete on leaderboards to show how much A.I. they’re using. They’re racking up big bills along the way.

People Loved the Dot-Com Boom. The A.I. Boom, Not So Much.

Tech leaders are beginning to worry about the public’s underwhelming enthusiasm for their plans to remake the world with artificial intelligence. Will that burst the bubble?

Prompts are technical debt too

It’s common and correct to say that “all code is technical debt”. Adding code is a necessary evil for developing new features: you almost always have to do it, but each line of code adds to the complexity and maintenance burden of the system. All future changes to the system have to work with the existing code, or at least avoid breaking it. Once systems accumulate enough code, they become impossible for a single person to understand: instead of reading the code and understanding what it does, you must rely on guesses, theories and heuristics1. Sensible engineers write as little code as possible.

Do AI-enabled companies need fewer people? | Seldo.com

AI-native startups are doing more with less — 40% smaller teams, 6x higher revenue per employee — and the data confirms it's not just hype. But the wave of new jobs I predicted hasn't materialized so far. Compute is replacing labor. Will that change?

Coopting Disruption

Our economy is dominated by five aging tech giants – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft. In the last twenty years, no company has commercialized a new

Slow down to speed up: so much has changed in 6 months’ time

An overview of what’s changed in engineering during the last six months, how various tech companies are changing how they work, and why slowing down could be a sensible strategy

Developer AI Token Costs Could Exceed Their Salaries in Two Years - Slashdot

"Enterprises may soon be paying as much for their developers' AI token usage as they do for their salaries," writes InfoWorld: According to Gartner, these costs will meet, or even exceed, the typical software engineer's monthly salary within the next two years. This is not only because developers ...

FinTech Adoption Across Generations: Financial Fitness in the Information Age

This paper analyzes how better access to financial information via new technology changes use of consumer credit and affects financial fitness. We exploit the introduction of a smartphone application for personal financial management as a source of exogenous variation. FinTech adoption reduces financial fee payments and penalties, but differs cross-sectionally in the population. After adopting the new technology, Millennials and members of Generation X incur fewer financial fees and penalties, whereas Baby Boomers do not benefit from the technological advance. Millennials and Gen Xers save fees by using their credit cards rather than overdrafts to manage short-term liabilities. Moreover, Millennials shift some of their spending to discretionary entertainment, whereas members of Generation X remain more austere. Finally, while men tend to adopt new technology and access information at a higher rate, the economic impact of access is larger for women.

You have to beat the models at something

In 2025, I wrote that software engineers ought to be assessed by “value over replacement”: not how much money they made for their company, but how much they…

Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?

Tech companies are pouring hundreds of billions into data centers, taking on heavy debt, but current revenue is relatively tiny. Critics warn of a new dot-com bubble.

The Other Bubble

Buried in the 8000 words I wrote last week was a worrying story — that Microsoft considered drastic measures to free up  capacity in its US-based servers for GPUs to power the AI boom. In an email shared with me by a source from earlier this year, Microsoft's senior leadership team