https://calnewport.com/no-one-knows-anything-about-ai/ [slow-productivity-cover-new] NEW BOOK! Explore a better way to work - one that promises more calm, clarity, and creativity. LEARN MORE Skip to content Cal Newport Menu Cal Newport Menu * Home * Scholarship * Writing * Essays * Press * Contact Home >> Blog >> No One Knows Anything About AI No One Knows Anything About AI July 21, 2025July 20, 2025 I want to present you with two narratives about AI. Both of them are about using this technology to automate computer programming, but they point toward two very different conclusions. The first narrative notes that Large Language Models (LLMs) are exceptionally well-suited for coding because source code, at its core, is just very well-structured text, which is exactly what these models excel at generating. Because of this tight match between need and capability, the programming industry is serving as an economic sacrificial lamb, the first major sector to suffer a major AI-driven upheaval. There has been no shortage of evidence to support these claims. Here are some examples, all from the last two months: * Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of the AI company Perplexity, claims AI tools like Cursor and GitHub Copilot cut task completion time for his engineers from "three or four days to one hour." He now mandates every employee in his company to use them: "The speed at which you can fix bugs and ship to production is scary." * An article in Inc . confidently declared: "In the world of software engineering, AI has indeed changed everything." * Not surprisingly, these immense new capabilities are being blamed for dire disruptions. One article from an investment site featured an alarming headline: "Tech Sector Sees 64,000 Job Cuts This Year Due to AI Advancement." No one is safe from such cuts. "Major companies like Microsoft have been at the forefront of these layoffs," the article explains, "citing AI advancements as a primary factor." * My world of academic computer science hasn't been spared either. A splashy Atlantic piece opens with a distressing claim: "The Computer Science-Bubble is Bursting," which it largely blames on AI, a technology it describes as "ideally suited to replace the very type of person who built it." Given the confidence of these claims, you'd assume that computer programmers are rapidly going the way of the telegraph operator. But, if you read a different set of articles and quotes from this same period, a very different narrative emerges: * The AI evaluation company METR recently released the results of a randomized control trial in which a group of experienced open-source software developers were sorted into two groups, one of which would use AI coding tools to complete a collection of tasks, and one of which would not. As the report summarizes: "Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without--AI makes them slower." * Meanwhile, other experienced engineers are beginning to push back on extreme claims about how AI will impact their industry. "Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw," quipped the developer Simon Willison . * Tech CEO Nick Khami reacted to the claim that AI tools will drastically reduce the number of employees required to build a software product as follows: "I feel like I'm being gaslit every time I read this, and I worry it makes folks early in their software development journey feel like it's a bad time investment." * But what about Microsoft replacing all those employees with AI tools? A closer look reveals that this is not what happened. The company's actual announcement clarified that cuts were spread across divisions (like gaming) to free up more funds to invest in AI initiatives--not because AI was replacing workers.. * What about the poor CS majors? Later in that same Atlantic article, an alternative explanation is floated. The tech sector has been contracting recently to correct for exuberant spending during the pandemic years. This soft market makes a difference: "enrollment in the computer-science major has historically fluctuated with the job market...[and] prior declines have always rebounded to enrollment levels higher than where they started." ( Personal history note: when I was studying computer science as an undergraduate in the early 2000s, I remember that there was consternation about the plummeting numbers of majors in the wake of the original dot-com bust.) Here we can find two completely different takes on the same AI issue, depending on what articles you read and what experts you listen to. What should we take away from this confusion? When it comes to AI's impacts, we don't yet know anything for sure. But this isn't stopping everyone from pretending like we do. My advice, for the moment: 1. Tune out both the most heated and the most dismissive rhetoric. 2. Focus on tangible changes in areas that you care about that really do seem connected to AI--read widely and ask people you trust about what they're seeing. 3. Beyond that, however, follow AI news with a large grain of salt. All of this is too new for anyone to really understand what they're saying. AI is important. But we don't yet fully know why. Dispatch From Vermont 5 thoughts on "No One Knows Anything About AI" 1. [svg][167bc9] Friday Vendreidi July 21, 2025 at 6:48 am I think AI will take us back to the basis of human work and evolution. It's only a matter of time; we will realise what AI is up to. Reply + [svg][284b96] Ivan July 21, 2025 at 4:30 pm Interesting, I think something similiar, something like: humans realized what makes us humans. Reply 2. [svg][8c9d69] Jacky Wang July 21, 2025 at 7:58 am As a software Engineer in ecommerce, there are also some noise of "Programming Works will be replaced by AI" around the workspace. Firstly, I felt nervous of "Losing work"... After a while, I started to use AI assistant Tool (such as XX-copilot, cursor etc.) in programming, I found that, it's true that programming in some fields with these assistants will speed up a lot. For example, you can automate generating Unit Test Code with Github-copilot just with some instructions in chat-box. But in the deep domain area, it's not so clever than an experienced engineer. In a word, we should embrace the new technology (various AI tools) to improve our productivity rather than just get some fears of "Be Replaced". Reply 3. [svg][4b34cd] Friedrich July 21, 2025 at 3:49 pm Knowledge workers take care of creating, distributing and applying knowledge. if you are creating, your job will be reduced to giving meaning the AI creations. If you are just distributing it. Computers excel at distribution. Your job will be reduced to fixing the distribution errors of AI. If you are just applying it. Computers can do that better with more consistency. Your job will be reduced to fixing the application errors of AI. Knowledge workers will be needed for sure. But the new jobs are all hard, all the easy jobs are gone. Now clicking/typing experts, those will not be needed. There are too many computer "experts" today that only click easy buttons all day. This job type is over. Computers are not disappearing, what is disappearing is clicking/typing/doing anything mindlessly as a job. Do you sit in a computer and type all day without thinking? Can you listen to music and sing songs while working in the computer? Do you join meetings and say the same thing every day without thinking? Do you talk to users and say the same things mindlessly every day? I am sorry, you were redundant a long time ago. You just got used to get easy money. Reply 4. [svg][1f2557] Steve S July 23, 2025 at 4:09 pm The end effect of AI will be to concentrate wealth. Every time in history that something has come along that promised to make work easier and more productive so that people could make a living by working less, the same thing has happened: employers have asked themselves why they should continue to pay those people who are now working less. So they don't. They increase the benefits of ownership instead. The industrial revolution, the robotics revolution, the uptake of computers.. all the same. An ownership class that instead of earning a multiple of 4 or 5 times what an employee earns move up to 10 times and 100 times and 1000 times. Reply Leave a Comment Cancel reply [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] Comment[ ] Name[ ] Email [ ] [ ] [ ] Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. [Post Comment] Cal Newport headshotCal Newport headshot About Cal launched the "Study Hacks" blog at calnewport.com in 2007, and has been regularly publishing essays here ever since. Over 2,000,000 people a year visit this site to read Cal's weekly posts about technology, productivity, and the quest to live and work deeply in an increasingly distracted world, while tens of thousands more subscribe to have these essays delivered directly to their inbox (see the sign-up form below). To read more, you can browse more than 15 years of past essays in the archive. In the fall of 2022, Cal launched a new portal, TheDeepLife.com, to serve as the online home for all other content relevant to the deep life movement he helped initiate. Here you can find all past episodes of Cal's popular podcast, Deep Questions, and explore an extensive library of original videos. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Cal Newport logo This site is the online home for the computer science professor and bestselling author Cal Newport. Here you can learn more about Cal and both his general-audience and academic writing. You can also browse and subscribe to his long-running weekly essay series. For more on Cal's podcast, videos, and online courses, please visit his media portal, TheDeepLife.com Contact Info Academic Communication cn248@georgetown.edu Media Inquires calnewport@penguinrandomhouse.com All Other Requests See Contact Page Quick Links * Scholarship * Writing * Essays * Press * Contact * Media Kit * Podcast/Videos * Privacy Policies * Cookie Policy * Terms of Service * Accessibility Statement Copyright (c) 2025 Cal Newport, All rights reserved. Cleantalk PixelCleantalk Pixel