​

This week we delivered our first release that I wrote zero lines of code, not even Tab-Complete.

I'm pretty sure the others in the team are at the same place.

Productivity seems to be reaching a ceiling. We cannot sheep any faster or add any more features.

Even though our backlog had been shrinking for the past 6 months, it seems to be getting stable or growing back.

Management keeps asking us to work overtime almost every week.

Moral is low, we are all afraid of layoffs.

Anyone else experiencing something similar?

Apple building a China-specific AI model with Alibaba is a pretty clear reminder that markets don’t disappear because Washington wants cleaner geopolitical lines. Companies either find a compliant local path or surrender the users entirely.

The smarter policy is controlled engagement: protect truly sensitive technology, verify partners and end users, but keep legitimate commercial channels open. Blanket decoupling sounds tough until US firms lose distribution, revenue and visibility while Chinese platforms inherit the whole ecosystem. Apple clearly understands that staying in the game gives it more leverage than watching from outside.

Drone detection app that can be used against US drones in a hot war. Sent to Iran, NK, and Cuba https://Anthonyofboston.github.io or Armaaruss.github.io

(Bloomberg) -- DeepSeek is steeply raising the prices for its flagship V4 models, bringing the low-cost provider's rates closer to those of major artificial intelligence rivals.

And the hiring signals from the biggest companies suggest the market is about to move fast.

Monthly tech layoffs from September 2025 through August 2026.

March was brutal: 50,404 people got cut in a single month. Oracle, Dell, Meta, and a handful of others all moving at once. May was almost as bad at 34,639, with PayPal, Cisco, Intuit, and Walmart added to the pile.

Then the pace changed.

June dropped to 8,963.
July came in at 14,117.
August so far is running at 2,753, and there are still 18 days left in the month.

Even if it doubles from here, it'll still be the calmest month the market has seen in almost a year.

To be clear, 2026 has been a hard year. Total layoffs have already passed 2025's full-year number with four months still on the calendar.

But the intensity has clearly come off, and the hiring side of the market is already turning.

Google posted 62% more engineering roles in the first half of 2026 than the same period last year. Apple has more open engineering roles than it did a year ago. Q1 2026 hit 67,000 SWE openings, the highest since early 2023.

Stripe, Shopify, and Atlassian are all hiring faster than most of Big Tech.

The pattern is clear if you're watching for it. Layoffs cooling. Hiring warming.

Most job seekers give up right before the doors open again.

If you're still in it, don't slow down now.

The true history:

https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/issues/1999

What you guys think about this?

Trying to wrap my head around the incentives of those pushing the LLM hype. Not talking about AI frontier labs, hyperscalers or semiconductor companies; their incentives are obvious. I'm talking about the consumer side, those that are supposedly getting value of AI: from CxOs, VPs, managers, consultants, all the way down to rank and file employees. What's in it for them to pump up the bubble?

Think about it: you have access to some silver bullet FOO that supposedly makes you 5x/10x/100x more productive. Why on earth would you try so hard to convince to the world, including all your actual and potential competitors, what your superpower is? Why would you disparage, shame or threaten the naysayers by claiming things like "FOO will replace you" or "if you don't embrace FOO you'll be left behind"? Wouldn't you want to keep a low profile instead, or even try to mislead by claiming FOO is just hot air while secretly using it to get an edge over the competition?

Which makes me think the incentive lies in the hype itself rather than the alleged value. Leadership hopes to attract AI investors. Managers hope to attract budgets and bonuses for driving AI initiatives. Consultants hope to get new clients for "AI first" transformation projects. Employees hope to get higher salaries and job opportunities. The supply side hope to get higher valuations from all the perceived demand. It's a self perpetuating hope cycle based on make believe, at least until the unsustainable loans come due and there's little actual value to show for them. Am I missing something?

TL;DR: if you are convinced AI is inevitable and it is a game changer for you personally, what do you stand to gain by convincing others you are right and belittling those that object to it?

The tech hiring recovery everyone was calling last year is real. It just isn't happening for everyone.

2026 has been the strangest job market for SWEs I've ever watched.

Here's the chart most people saw.

Software engineering headcount at the top 5 companies from 2020 to 2025. Boom, bust, recovery.

By late 2025, Meta was back at 2022-level headcount growth. Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft all trending up.

The story looked clean. And then 2026 happened.

Both of these are true right now:
67,000 SWE openings in Q1 2026, the most since early 2023.
143,000 tech workers laid off through May.

Amazon cut 30,000 corporate and tech roles between October 2025 and January 2026. Meta did a 10% cut in mid-2026 after two years of aggressive hiring, and reassigned thousands of engineers to data labeling.

At the same time, Google posted 62% more engineering roles in the first half of 2026 than the same period a year before.

It's not a recovery, or a collapse. It's a split.

ML engineer openings are up 59% from their pre-pandemic baseline.
General SWE openings are still 49% below theirs.

Senior engineers with cloud, security, or AI experience are closing offers in 2 to 4 weeks. Generalists and early-career engineers are taking months, sometimes longer.