Existential Insecurity.
Brain drain.
1. Parmy Olson:
Ben Cherny, who runs Claude Code at Anthropic, tells me that despite being a prolific programmer, he hasn’t written a single line of computer code in the last two months. Like his team members, he’s using plain-English prompts with AI. “That’s what coding is nowadays,” he says. Two other technology startups I spoke to concurred. “Most of our engineers are not writing code anymore,” says Lawrence Jones, founding engineer at London-based Incident.io, which troubleshoots software problems and was an early adopter of Claude Code. “They’re talking through solutions with Claude.”
When Anthropic’s engineers noticed that people without programming experience were using the tool, they were struck with an idea: Perhaps Claude Code could also excel at using a computer. Computer code is a near-perfect mirror of sights, sounds and actions in the digital world, so why couldn’t an AI programmer be a computer operator too?
Over ten days, Anthropic’s engineers used Claude Code to build a more user-friendly version of itself, one that had the look and feel of a regular chatbot. They didn’t write lines of code but rather used every day language to guide Claude Code in the black terminal of their laptops. The result was Claude Cowork, which was rolled out last week and is now available to anyone with a $20-a-month subscription to Claude, as well as the company’s enterprise customers. Anthropic has emphasized it’s still a “research preview” and may have rough edges.
But Cowork has put Anthropic at an inflection point, where the hype around its coding tool could create momentum for a more mainstream breakout. (Source: bloomberg.com)
2. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s latest essay, The Adolescence of Technology, Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI, is worth reading in its entirety. You’ll learn a lot. You’ll be unnerved by what he’s written. You’ll be glad he wrote it. (Source: darioamodei.com)
3. Science.org:
Some 10,109 doctoral-trained experts in science and related fields left their jobs last year as President Trump dramatically shrank the overall federal workforce. That exodus was only 3% of the 335,192 federal workers who exited last year but represents 14% of the total number of Ph.D.s in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) or health fields employed at the end of 2024 as then-President Joe Biden prepared to leave office.
