77 posts
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
I built Skillenai's chat on Claude Managed Agents — file, bash, sandbox, and our API — and I'll never go back to the days of orchestration frameworks. Our data shows the field is already flipping the same way: in tech news, low-level agent runtimes went from ~30% to 71% of framework-vs-runtime mentions across 2026, while hiring still lags 12:1.
June 15, 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
I tested my analogy that Forward Deployed Engineers are to AI Engineers what Solutions Architects were to Software Engineers. Across ~44K postings, the data agrees: FDE is literally AIE on the AI axis, SA on the customer axis. Plus, two twists I didn't expect.
June 5, 2026
Fortune today: spring 2026 hiring is broad-based. Jensen Huang: "software engineers are increasing." Both right at the aggregate. Drop a level and our US tech corpus shows tech has roughly two career-entry roles — Software Engineer and Data Analyst — and a longer list of post-experience lateral specializations (MLE, Platform, SRE, Backend).
June 4, 2026
A new LSE working paper used 243M hire records to argue remote work — not AI — caused the entry-level hiring collapse. We tested the prediction in today's US tech job postings, role by role. Every Bonferroni-significant broken ladder is in an AI-light role.
June 3, 2026
