The announcement hit a nerve because it seemed to confirm public fears about the impact of AI on white-collar work. A widely read essay<\/a> from Citrini Research last weekend predicted that AI-driven progress would drive wave after wave of layoffs.<\/p>\n Earlier this month, author Matt Shumer made similar claims in a viral blog post called \u201cSomething Big Is Happening.\u201d<\/a> Shumer argued that disruption has already started in the software industry. Here\u2019s how he described being a programmer today:<\/p>\n I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed.<\/p>\n He predicted that AI agents will soon come for other white-collar jobs.<\/p>\n \u201cAI isn\u2019t replacing one specific skill,\u201d he writes. \u201cIt\u2019s a general substitute for cognitive work.\u201d In Shumer\u2019s view, this means that lawyers, financial analysts, writers, radiologists, customer service representatives, and many others can expect their work to be automated.<\/p>\n \u201cNothing that can be done on a computer is safe in the medium term,\u201d he concludes. \u201cIf it even kind of works today, you can be almost certain that in six months it\u2019ll do it near perfectly.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to predict what models will be able to do in the future, so I don\u2019t know how soon LLMs will automate the work of lawyers or financial analysts. But as a journalist, I can talk to programmers to see if their experience today matches Shumer\u2019s dramatic description. For this story, I talked to more than a dozen software industry professionals \u2014 programmers and their bosses \u2014 about how AI agents are changing their work.<\/p>\n I learned that Shumer is exaggerating the pace of progress in software development. It\u2019s not true that AI agents consistently produce production-ready software from a single prompt. Human programmers are still needed to make big-picture architectural decisions, write detailed instructions, and verify code after it\u2019s generated.<\/p>\n But Shumer (and Dorsey) are right that something big is happening.<\/p>\n \u201cI worked at Google for years and managed lots of people,\u201d said Understanding AI reader Jim Muller<\/a>. In his post-Google life, Muller has been writing software for two<\/a> small companies<\/a> he co-founded with his wife. He has made extensive use of Claude Code, which he likened to \u201ca particularly reckless and nutty junior-level engineer.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite that unflattering description, Muller believes Claude Code has dramatically increased his productivity. Even a reckless and nutty engineer is pretty useful.<\/p>\n I also talked to a manager who oversees a team of 20 programmers at a non-profit organization. He estimates that over the last year, coding agents have helped his team more than double their productivity \u2014 at least as measured by the number of software updates (known as pull requests) they submit each month.<\/p>\n But he also pointed to some downsides of the new approach.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is now the CEO of Block, which runs payment services like Square and Cash…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":313950,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,85,46,125],"class_list":{"0":"post-313949","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-israel","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313949"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313949\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/313950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/https:\/\/substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/public\/images\/fbc26d59-77e2-4572-a7f8-c47ac14bbe75_4196.jpeg\")
<\/a>Block CEO Jack Dorsey. (Photo by MARCO BELLO\/AFP via Getty Images)<\/p>\n