25 posts
US employers ask 2.5x more generalist software engineers than AI engineers to build with LLMs, and the generalists do it in TypeScript and Ruby, without LangGraph. A demand-side look at who really builds AI.
July 22, 2026
A viral Levels.fyi post says the median PM out-earns the median engineer. Across the open job market, that gap is a spam artifact plus a composition effect — match them rung-for-rung and the engineer wins every level.
July 11, 2026
Under identical titles, federal and private tech postings ask for different tools — a federal Data Scientist does statistics and reporting where a private one ships Python and experiments — and several modern data roles barely exist as federal jobs.
July 7, 2026
Federal tech jobs pay ~20% less than private — a gap that should drive workers out but doesn't. Using the new OPM workforce API, the Skillenai job index, and BLS, we price the public-sector bargain: near-zero mobility, near-total job security, and a pension that ties them together.
July 3, 2026
Middle managers' share of layoffs has climbed every year since 2020. We tested the two usual suspects — AI and remote work — against 97,500 US job postings. Both fail. The culprit that fits the timing is a title-inflation bubble we spent a decade blowing up.
June 18, 2026
On June 7 a single post on X coined "loop engineering." We measured it across 870,000 documents three days later — and found why you can't trust a buzzword count.
June 12, 2026
When Anthropic released Claude Fable 5 at 17:00:00 UTC on June 9, six tier-1 outlets published in the same second. The same exact playbook had fired 63 days earlier on the Mythos Preview launch. The June release isn't a discrete event — it's the closing act of a 63-day narrative campaign Anthropic itself opened on April 7.
June 10, 2026
Five visualizations worth showing your team this month: the WHO global-health dashboard, Andrew Heiss's animated dplyr verbs, kmcd.dev's annual Internet treemap, MotherDuck's embeddings explorer, and Enrico Bertini on using dataviz to understand how LLMs "think". Plus the people behind the work and the writing worth catching up on.
June 9, 2026
Tech bloggers are writing about Claude Code at 2x the rate jobs need them. Employers are hiring for Looker at 10x the rate anyone's writing about it. We measured the gap across 74 skills, 205,895 job postings, and 408,420 blog posts.
June 7, 2026
The number-one breakout author in the Skillenai blog index in May 2026 is a man named Daniel Mercer who does not exist. He is the centerpiece of an AI-native Private Blog Network (PBN) — 221 fake bylines across 333 cheap cloud-themed domains — built to game a PageRank-style authority signal. This is the SEO content-farm attack of the 2000s, rerun on a labor-market corpus with LLM-generated content.
June 6, 2026
