5️⃣ Consumers were more pessimistic about current and future labor-market conditions, as well as the outlook for incomes and business conditions. 📖: #LaborMarket# #Economy#

There it is folks: Interest rate futures now see a BASE CASE of the next Fed move being a rate HIKE. In fact, the odds of the Fed cutting interest rates before July 2027 are a mere 1%. As inflation hits its highest level since 2023, the Fed is left with no option. All as Consumer Confidence just hit a record low and the labor market is weakening under the surface. Rate hikes into stagflation are coming.

AI’s biggest problem is not intelligence. It’s accountability. An AI agent can run ads, write code, negotiate deals, and manage capital. But no existing system can determine whether its work was actually valuable. That’s the category @GenLayer unlocks: The first autonomous labor market for AI agents. Imagine a startup posting one objective: Increase revenue by 20%. AI agents compete automatically. One handles growth. One optimizes pricing. One redesigns funnels. One analyzes competitors in real time. The breakthrough is this: GenLayer Intelligent Contracts can evaluate outcomes, not just fixed inputs. They can: analyze live web data interpret subjective performance reason contextually reach decentralized consensus on success or failure The contract becomes the manager, auditor, and escrow layer at the same time. If the agent creates real business impact it gets paid. If results are manipulated or weak → payment is slashed automatically. That is impossible on deterministic blockchains. And once AI agents can be evaluated economically, companies stop scaling through employees. They scale through autonomous agents. The next billion-dollar startup may have: 5 humans 50,000 AI workers 0 middle managers That’s why @GenLayer is more than “AI onchain.” It’s infrastructure for machine economies. What happens when AI starts hiring AI?

As AI agents accelerate coding, what is the future of software engineering? Some trends are clear, such as the Product Management Bottleneck, referring to the idea that we are more constrained by deciding what to build rather than the actual building. But many implications, like AI’s impact on the job market, how software teams will be organized, and more, are still being sorted out. The theme of our AI Developer Conference on April 28-29 in San Francisco is The Future of Software Engineering. I look forward to speaking about this topic there, hearing from other speakers on this theme, and chatting with attendees about it. We’re shaping the future, and I hope you will join me there! It is currently trendy in some technology and policy circles to forecast massive job losses due to AI. Even if they have not yet materialized, these losses certainly must be just over the horizon! I have a contrarian view that the AI jobpocalypse — the notion that AI will lead to massive unemployment, perhaps even rioting in the streets — won’t be nearly as bad as dire forecasts by pundits, especially pundits who are trying to paint a picture of how powerful their AI technology is. Among professions, AI is accelerating software engineering most, given the rise of coding agents. According to a new report by Citadel Research, software engineering job postings are rising rapidly. So if software engineering is a harbinger of the impact AI will have on other professions, this expansion of software engineering jobs is encouraging. Yes, fresh college graduates are having a hard time finding jobs. And yes, there have been layoffs that CEOs have attributed to AI, even if a large fraction of this was “AI washing,” where businesses choose to attribute layoffs to AI, even though AI has not changed their internal operations much yet. And yes, there is a subset of job roles, such as call center operator, that are more heavily impacted. Many people are feeling significant job insecurity, and I feel for everyone struggling with employment, whether or not the cause is AI-related. And many other factors, such as over-hiring during the pandemic and high interest rates, have contributed to the slowdown in the labor market, and the notion that AI is leading to unemployment is oversimplified. In software engineering, I see a lot of exciting work ahead to adapt our workflows. It is already clear that: (i) As AI makes coding easier, a lot more people will be doing it. (ii) Writing code by hand and even reading (generated) code is not that important, because we can ask an LLM about the code and operate at a higher level than the raw syntax (although how high we can or should go is rapidly changing). (iii) There will be a lot more custom applications, because now it’s economical to write software for smaller and smaller audiences. (iv) Deciding what to build, more than the actual building, is becoming a bottleneck. (v) The cost of paying down technical debt is decreasing (since AI can refactor for you). At the same time, there are also a lot of open questions for our profession, such as: - In the future, what will be the key skills of a senior software engineer? And for junior levels, what should be the new Computer Science curriculum? - If everyone can build features, what skills, strategies, or resources create competitive advantage for individuals and for businesses? - What are the new building blocks (libraries, SDKs, etc.) of software? How do we organize coding agents to create software? - What should a software team look like? For example, how many engineers, product managers, designers, and so on. What tooling do we need to manage their workflow? - How do AI agents change the workflow of machine learning engineers and data scientists? For example, how can we use agents to accelerate exploring data, identifying hypotheses, and testing them? I’m excited to explore these and other questions about the future of software engineering at AI Dev. I expect this to be an exciting event. Please join us! [Original text: The Batch newsletter.]