On recent AI progress
I'm on record as being on the skeptical side of AI progress as of late.[1],[2] In brief, all AIs are close in the benchmarks[3] and also feel pretty comparable wrt to performance, and also not a crazy qualitative step change vs GPT-3.5/4, compared to the wow of going from GPT-2.
But now as of a month ago, there seems to be a lot happening especially wrt to agentic coding.
- Bridgewater's AIA Forecaster, which uses a multi-agent architecture with retrieval and statistical calibration, is claimed to be statistically indistinguishable from superforecasters, yet it still underperforms liquid prediction market consensus.[4]
- My whole research workflow has changed; I seem to be able to generate economics papers with Claude Code; I sent a link about 'Gastown' to a friend, who shared feedback from a contact already using it in production. He explained that while standard assistants often hit 'context overload' and try to cut corners, Gastown avoids this by splitting duties between a 'Task Master' that plans and 'Workers' that execute. He described the experience as managing 'a team of dumb but persistent interns'—agents that never get bored and strictly follow TDD rules, refusing to proceed until tests pass.
- Markets seem to be reacting:
Now we are getting serious…
by Tyler Cowen February 4, 2026 at 2:39 am in
It is about time:
'US tech stocks fell sharply on Tuesday as fresh concerns about the impact of AI on software businesses swept across Wall Street.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell 1.4 per cent, while the broader S&P 500 was down 0.8 per cent. Markets were dragged lower by large declines for a host of analytics groups following AI company Anthropic's launch of productivity tools for its Claude Cowork platform that can help automate legal work.
Analytics groups Gartner and S&P Global fell 21 per cent and 11 per cent, respectively, while Intuit and Equifax both declined more than 10 per cent. Moody's fell 9 per cent and FactSet lost 11 per cent.
A JPMorgan index tracking US software stocks fell 7 per cent, taking its loss this year to 18 per cent.'
Here is more from the FT.
- Hackernews, Reddit for software engineers, is abuzz with AI news; some of top 10 most upvoted articles:
Mon, Feb 2
- 2050 892 xAI joins SpaceX (www.spacex.com)
- 518 401 Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft (www.theverge.com)
Wed, Feb 4
Thu, Feb 5
- 597 1510 GPT-5.3-Codex (openai.com)
- 1007 2308 Claude Opus 4.6 (www.anthropic.com)
- 710 718 We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler (www.anthropic.com)
- 395 931 My AI Adoption Journey (mitchellh.com)
Sat, Feb 7
- 694 392 The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else (www.washingtonpost.com)
- 234 649 Start all of your commands with a comma (2009) (rhodesmill.org)
- 439 279 Software factories and the agentic moment (factory.strongdm.ai)
- 795 708 We mourn our craft (nolanlawson.com)
- 271 335 U.S. jobs disappear at fastest January pace since great recession (www.forbes.com)
Sun, Feb 8
- 296 364 I am happier writing code by hand (www.abhinavomprakash.com)
- 287 416 AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it (siddhantkhare.com)
- 304 351 Slop Terrifies Me (ezhik.jp)
- 441 279 OpenClaw is changing my life (reorx.com)
- 76 139 Claude's C Compiler vs. GCC (harshanu.space)