Study Hacks, Author at Cal Newport - Page 4 of 4

The Dangers of “Vibe Reporting” About AI

February 2, 2026February 2, 2026

Last week, news broke that Amazon would be laying off 16,000 workers. Here was the headline from an article about this news published in Quartz:

The implication of this framing is clear: AI is taking jobs.

Nothing in the body of this article contradicts this idea. It describes the number of people laid off and the benefits they’ll receive. It quotes executives who won’t deny the possibility of future job losses. It mentions how Amazon is known for its “cutthroat” corporate culture.

You walk away feeling that the impact of AI on our economy is already getting out of hand.

The only problem is that this reporting omits almost all relevant details.

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Last week, Boris Cherny, the creator and head of Anthropic’s popular Claude Code programming agent, posted a thread on X about how he personally used the AI tool in his own work. It created a stir. “What began as a casual sharing of his personal terminal setup has spiraled into a viral manifesto on the future of software development,” explained a VentureBeat article about the incident.

As Cherny explained, he runs five different instances of the coding agent at the same time, each in its own tab in his terminal: ‘While one agent runs a test suite, another refactors a legacy module, and a third drafts documentation.’ He cycles rapidly through these tabs, providing further instruction or gentle prods to each agent as needed, checking their work, and sending them back to improve their output.

One user, responding to the thread, described the approach like playing the famously fast-paced video game Starcraft. The VentureBeat article described Cherny as operating like a “fleet commander.” It all seemed like a lot of fun.

But here’s the thing: If I were a software developer, I would be wary of any such demonstration.

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.

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