May 24th, 2026

Articles of the week

This week I picked up these articles:

Learned/Notes

How I choose which employees to replace with AI

I read this and was thinking stuff such as "Wow, it's good to see a CEO being transparent about why they're making such decisions", "Of course layoffs suck but this gives all of us some visibility to know which skills are at jeopardy". I shared the article with a couple friends and they all seemed to have negative feelings about what the CEO said, not positive or neutral like mine. I find it a bit odd that most of the time this happens, I tend to stay positive compared to others. I want to dig into this a bit more.

In short, the CEO basically is categorizing employees in 3 buckets: builders, sellers, and measurers. He says builders (developers, designers, etc) are good and if anything AI helps them — I agree, with AI we can produce stuff more easily. Sellers are also good because of the human-to-human trust that you need in order to sell products. However, measurers ("internal audit, revenue recognition, finance, legal, compliance, middle management, operations and on and on.") are the ones at risk because this is what AI can do the best.

I'm curious, what do you think? I would love to hear more opinions and dig into why I tend to view everything through a positive lens. You can reach me at my LinkedIn or email at no3lcodes@gmail.com.

Also, I'm not saying layoffs are nice nor am I happy for them. I definitely feel sorry for whoever is affected by them and if you want a referral for JPMC reach out to me. I am super neutral about them; from an employee perspective it definitely sucks, from an employer maybe they're necessary, maybe not, I'm not sure.

IC work is the new career flex

I also read 2-3 other blogs from Elena Verna, she has such good advice for anyone interested in being an Individual Contributor (IC) or Solopreneur.

In this blog (also related to AI, what's not nowadays?) Elena talks about the ability that AI gives us all, which is to have the same baseline of intelligence (what AI models have) and so those of us with domain expertise or other type of knowledge can use AI to produce results they couldn't do before. Elena gives the example of being a manager and having to, well, manage people, and not having the time to come up with a page on their own or work on JIRA tickets even if they wanted to. But now with AI? My manager is a prime example, he is producing a TON of code and still is able to manage the team.

AI opens up the path for some people who were tied to just managing people before, to being Individual Contributors now and Elena seems to love it. I think this is great for the industry since lots of people who are high producers and were limited by their duties as managers, can now do both. However, I do think this also has a negative impact because less people are needed, managers may prefer to stop managing altogether and just focus on IC work, which means people won't receive training/mentorship and what will happen in the future?

How to land a frontier lab job

This blog was amazing and if you're interested in working at one of the frontier labs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind) I recommend reading it.

Vlad presents two paths you can take if you're not into training AI models. The two paths are one above and one below of the people developing the models. Below you have Kernel work, things such as actual device kernel dev, inference, tooling that facilitate research and development (R&D) around this eco-system. The path above is agentic loops, leveraging the model as a gray box and harnessing it to produce the outcomes you want (finetuning the model).

I found it interesting to see the two possibilities, Vlad says there is a lot more, and I'd agree. So many new roles are being created and it's exciting times to develop new skills if you choose to.