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The suspension of the H1B visa program is bad for the US, bad for innovation, and will shatter dreams and disrupt lives. As a former H1B visa holder, my heart goes out to all the families affected.

The new White House policy requiring green card applicants to apply from outside the US is a capricious attack on legal immigration. It will hurt families, leave us with fewer doctors, teachers and scientists, and hurt American competitiveness in AI.

Some people today are discouraging others from learning programming on the grounds AI will automate it. This advice will be seen as some of the worst career advice ever given. I disagree with the Turing Award and Nobel prize winner who wrote, “It is far more likely that the programming occupation will become extinct [...] than that it will become all-powerful. More and more, computers will program themselves.”​ Statements discouraging people from learning to code are harmful! In the 1960s, when programming moved from punchcards (where a programmer had to laboriously make holes in physical cards to write code character by character) to keyboards with terminals, programming became easier. And that made it a better time than before to begin programming. Yet it was in this era that Nobel laureate Herb Simon wrote the words quoted in the first paragraph. Today’s arguments not to learn to code continue to echo his comment. As coding becomes easier, more people should code, not fewer! Over the past few decades, as programming has moved from assembly language to higher-level languages like C, from desktop to cloud, from raw text editors to IDEs to AI assisted coding where sometimes one barely even looks at the generated code (which some coders recently started to call vibe coding), it is getting easier with each step. I wrote previously that I see tech-savvy people coordinating AI tools to move toward being 10x professionals — individuals who have 10 times the impact of the average person in their field. I am increasingly convinced that the best way for many people to accomplish this is not to be just consumers of AI applications, but to learn enough coding to use AI-assisted coding tools effectively. One question I’m asked most often is what someone should do who is worried about job displacement by AI. My answer is: Learn about AI and take control of it, because one of the most important skills in the future will be the ability to tell a computer exactly what you want, so it can do that for you. Coding (or getting AI to code for you) is a great way to do that. When I was working on the course Generative AI for Everyone and needed to generate AI artwork for the background images, I worked with a collaborator who had studied art history and knew the language of art. He prompted Midjourney with terminology based on the historical style, palette, artist inspiration and so on — using the language of art — to get the result he wanted. I didn’t know this language, and my paltry attempts at prompting could not deliver as effective a result. Similarly, scientists, analysts, marketers, recruiters, and people of a wide range of professions who understand the language of software through their knowledge of coding can tell an LLM or an AI-enabled IDE what they want much more precisely, and get much better results. As these tools are continuing to make coding easier, this is the best time yet to learn to code, to learn the language of software, and learn to make computers do exactly what you want them to do. [Original text: https://t.co/HdI3Jb9HmF ]

I wish schools could make homework so joyful that students want to do it themselves, rather than let ChatGPT have all the fun.

1/The call for a 6 month moratorium on making AI progress beyond GPT-4 is a terrible idea. I'm seeing many new applications in education, healthcare, food, ... that'll help many people. Improving GPT-4 will help. Lets balance the huge value AI is creating vs. realistic risks.

“Loop engineering” is a hot buzzphrase after mentions of it by Boris Cherny (Claude Code’s creator) and Peter Steinberger (OpenClaw's creator) went viral on social media. Loops are now a key part of how we get AI agents to iterate at length to build software. In this letter, I’d like to share my 3 key loops, shown in the image below, for building 0-to-1 products. These loops guide not just how I build software, but also how I decide what software to build. Agentic coding loop: Given a product specification and optionally a set of evals (that is, a dataset against which to measure performance), we can have an AI agent write code, test its work, and keep iterating until the code is bug-free and meets its specification. This idea of closing the loop took off around the end of last year, and it has been a game changer in enabling coding agents to work longer productively without human intervention. For example, over the weekend, I was building an app for my daughter to practice typing, and my coding agent could easily work for around an hour, using a web browser to check what it had built multiple times before getting back to me, without needing my intervention. The engineering loop executes quickly. Every few minutes, the coding agent might build and test a new version of the software. I hear frequently from developers who are finding new ways to engineer more effective engineering loops. This is an active area of invention! Developer feedback loop: In this loop, a developer examines the current product and steers the coding agent to improve it. Last year, a lot of developers (including me) were acting as the QA (quality assurance) function for our coding agents, manually finding bugs and then asking the agent to fix them. But with coding agents much more able to test their own code, the amount of time we need to spend on this function has decreased significantly. This allows us to make higher-level product decisions, such as what key features to offer, where the UI needs improvement, and so on. The developer-feedback loop operates over time intervals between tens of minutes and hours — that's how frequently a developer might review a product and give feedback. In the case of the typing app, I changed my mind a few times about the visual design, what cat costumes she can unlock as she learns (she loves cats), and the user flow for a grown-up to log in and steer the child's learning experience. When a developer has a clear vision for what to build, it is still a lot of work to translate that vision into a specification for a coding agent to implement. Further, after the developer has seen an implementation, they might update (or perhaps clarify) the spec to steer it toward what they want. If you find that the system repeatedly runs into certain problems, building a set of evals for the agent becomes useful. AI-native teams are increasingly using AI to help shape product direction, for example, automating the gathering and analysis of usage data, summarizing written and verbal customer feedback, or carrying out competitive analysis. However, for pretty much all the products I’m involved in, I see humans as having a significant context advantage over current AI systems — we know a lot more than the AI system about the users and the context the product has to operate in — and thus humans play a critical role. Many people describe this human contribution as “taste,” but I prefer to think of it as humans having a context advantage, since that gives us a clearer path to helping AI systems get better. This also speaks to why this step can’t be automated: So long as the human knows something the AI does not, human-in-the-loop is needed to to inject that knowledge into the system. External feedback loop: This includes a wide range of tactics like asking a few friends for feedback, launching to alpha testers, or putting the code into production with A/B testing. These tactics are usually slow, rarely taking less than hours and sometimes taking days or even weeks. This data informs the developer vision, which in turn continues to drive the detailed product spec, which in turn drives the coding agent. With coding agents speeding up software development, more engineers are starting to play a partial product management role. For many engineers who are growing into this role, the hardest part is shaping the product vision and striking a balance between building (bridging the gap between vision and spec) and getting user feedback to evolve the vision. It is important to do both! I will write more about how to do this in future posts, but for now, I find it encouraging that engineers are playing an expanded role (just as product managers and designers now do more engineering). [Original text: The Batch]

I'm teaching a new course! AI Python for Beginners is a series of four short courses that teach anyone to code, regardless of current technical skill. We are offering these courses free for a limited time. Generative AI is transforming coding. This course teaches coding in a way that’s aligned with where the field is going, rather than where it has been: (1) AI as a Coding Companion. Experienced coders are using AI to help write snippets of code, debug code, and the like. We embrace this approach and describe best-practices for coding with a chatbot. Throughout the course, you'll have access to an AI chatbot that will be your own coding companion that can assist you every step of the way as you code. (2) Learning by Building AI Applications. You'll write code that interacts with large language models to quickly create fun applications to customize poems, write recipes, and manage a to-do list. This hands-on approach helps you see how writing code that calls on powerful AI models will make you more effective in your work and personal projects. With this approach, beginning programmers can learn to do useful things with code far faster than they could have even a year ago. Knowing a little bit of coding is increasingly helping people in job roles other than software engineers. For example, I've seen a marketing professional write code to download web pages and use generative AI to derive insights; a reporter write code to flag important stories; and an investor automate the initial drafts of contracts. With this course you’ll be equipped to automate repetitive tasks, analyze data more efficiently, and leverage AI to enhance your productivity. If you are already an experienced developer, please help me spread the word and encourage your non-developer friends to learn a little bit of coding. I hope you'll check out the first two short courses here! https://t.co/lTupltSZkT

I stand with Ukraine 🇺🇦 against Putin's unprovoked invasion.

Today's "DeepSeek selloff" in the stock market -- attributed to DeepSeek V3/R1 disrupting the tech ecosystem -- is another sign that the application layer is a great place to be. The foundation model layer being hyper-competitive is great for people building applications.

My new course, Generative AI for Everyone, is now available! Learn how Generative AI works, how to use it in professional or personal settings, and how it will affect jobs, businesses and society. This course is accessible to everyone, and assumes no prior coding or AI experience. Please access it here: https://t.co/XnBqgbJgyF

Announcing my new course: Agentic AI! Building AI agents is one of the most in-demand skills in the job market. This course, available now at https://t.co/zGHUh1loPO, teaches you how. You'll learn to implement four key agentic design patterns: - Reflection, in which an agent examines its own output and figures out how to improve it - Tool use, in which an LLM-driven application decides which functions to call to carry out web search, access calendars, send email, write code, etc. - Planning, where you'll use an LLM to decide how to break down a task into sub-tasks for execution, and - Multi-agent collaboration, in which you build multiple specialized agents — much like how a company might hire multiple employees — to perform a complex task You'll also learn to take a complex application and systematically decompose it into a sequence of tasks to implement using these design patterns. But here's what I think is the most important part of this course: Having worked with many teams on AI agents, I've found that the single biggest predictor of whether someone executes well is their ability to drive a disciplined process for evals and error analysis. In this course, you'll learn how to do this, so you can efficiently home in on which components to improve in a complex agentic workflow. Instead of guessing what to work on, you'll let evals data guide you. This will put you significantly ahead of the game compared to the vast majority of teams building agents. Together, we'll build a deep research agent that searches, synthesizes, and reports, using all of these agentic design patterns and best practices. This self-paced course is taught in a vendor neutral way, using raw Python - without hiding details in a framework. You'll see how each step works, and learn the core concepts that you can then implement using any popular agentic AI framework, or using no framework. The only prerequisite is familiarity with Python, though knowing a bit about LLMs helps. Come join me, and let's build some agentic AI systems! Sign up to get started: https://t.co/FX35dloqw4

My heart goes out to all the families and individuals anxious over their futures following the abrupt and chaotic announcement of H-1B visa changes. America should be working to attract more skilled talent, not create uncertainly that turns them away. To all legal immigrants and H1-B holders: I support and appreciate you.

1/Large language models like Galactica and ChatGPT can spout nonsense in a confident, authoritative tone. This overconfidence - which reflects the data they’re trained on - makes them more likely to mislead.

The new White House policy requiring green card applicants to apply from outside the US is a capricious attack on legal immigration. It will hurt families, leave us with fewer doctors, teachers and scientists, and hurt American competitiveness in AI.

What do you think is the single most important problem that the AI community should be working on?

In 2021, what do you think is the single most important problem that the AI community should be working on?

What do you want to learn in 2024?

I'd like to have a real conversation about whether AI is a risk for human extinction. Honestly, I don't get how AI poses this risk. What are your thoughts? And, who do you think has a thoughtful perspective on how AI poses this risk that I should talk to?

My heart goes out to all the families and individuals anxious over their futures following the abrupt and chaotic announcement of H-1B visa changes. America should be working to attract more skilled talent, not create uncertainly that turns them away. To all legal immigrants and H1-B holders: I support and appreciate you.

There will be no AI jobpocalypse. The story that AI will lead to massive unemployment is stoking unnecessary fear. AI — like any other technology — does affect jobs, but telling overblown stories of large-scale unemployment is irresponsible and damaging. Let’s put a stop to it. I’ve expressed skepticism about the jobpocalypse in previous posts. I’m glad to see that the popular press is now pushing back on this narrative. The image below features some recent headlines. Software engineering is the sector most affected by AI tools, as coding agents race ahead. Yet hiring of software engineers remains strong! So while there are examples of AI taking away jobs, the trends strongly suggest the net job creation is vastly greater than the job destruction — just like earlier waves of technology. Further, despite all the exciting progress in AI, the U.S. unemployment rate remains a healthy 4.3%. Why is the AI jobpocalypse narrative so popular? For one thing, frontier AI labs have a strong incentive to tell stories that make AI technology sound more powerful. At their most extreme, they promote science-fiction scenarios of AI “taking over” and causing human extinction. If a technology can replace many employees, surely that technology must be very valuable! Also, a lot of SaaS software companies charge around $100-$1000 per user/year. But if an AI company can replace an employee who makes $100,000 — or make them 50% more productive — then charging even $10,000 starts to look reasonable. By anchoring not to typical SaaS prices but to salaries of employees, AI companies can charge a lot more. Additionally, businesses have a strong incentive to talk about layoffs as if they were caused by AI. After all, talking about how they’re using AI to be far more productive with fewer staff makes them look smart. This is a better message than admitting they overhired during the pandemic when capital was abundant due to low interest rates and a massive government financial stimulus. To be clear, I recognize that AI is causing a lot of people’s work to change. This is hard. This is stressful. (And to some, it can be fun.) I empathize with everyone affected. At the same time, this is very different from predicting a collapse of the job market. Societies are capable of telling themselves stories for years that have little basis in reality and lead to poor society-wide decision making. For example, fears over nuclear plant safety led to under-investment in nuclear power. Fears of the “population bomb” in the 1960s led countries to implement harsh policies to reduce their populations. And worries about dietary fat led governments to promote unhealthy high-sugar diets for decades. Now that mainstream media is openly skeptical about the jobpocalypse, I hope these stories will start to lose their teeth (much like fears of AI-driven human extinction have). Contrary to the predictions of an AI jobpocalypse, I predict the opposite: There will be an AI jobapalooza! AI will lead to a lot more good AI engineering jobs, and I’m also optimistic about the future of the overall job market. What AI engineers do will be different from traditional software engineering, and many of these jobs will be in businesses other than traditional large employers of developers. In non-AI roles, too, the skills needed will change because of AI. That makes this a good time to encourage more people to become proficient in AI, and make sure they’re ready for the different but plentiful jobs of the future! [Original text in The Batch newsletter.]

Some people today are discouraging others from learning programming on the grounds AI will automate it. This advice will be seen as some of the worst career advice ever given. I disagree with the Turing Award and Nobel prize winner who wrote, “It is far more likely that the programming occupation will become extinct [...] than that it will become all-powerful. More and more, computers will program themselves.”​ Statements discouraging people from learning to code are harmful! In the 1960s, when programming moved from punchcards (where a programmer had to laboriously make holes in physical cards to write code character by character) to keyboards with terminals, programming became easier. And that made it a better time than before to begin programming. Yet it was in this era that Nobel laureate Herb Simon wrote the words quoted in the first paragraph. Today’s arguments not to learn to code continue to echo his comment. As coding becomes easier, more people should code, not fewer! Over the past few decades, as programming has moved from assembly language to higher-level languages like C, from desktop to cloud, from raw text editors to IDEs to AI assisted coding where sometimes one barely even looks at the generated code (which some coders recently started to call vibe coding), it is getting easier with each step. I wrote previously that I see tech-savvy people coordinating AI tools to move toward being 10x professionals — individuals who have 10 times the impact of the average person in their field. I am increasingly convinced that the best way for many people to accomplish this is not to be just consumers of AI applications, but to learn enough coding to use AI-assisted coding tools effectively. One question I’m asked most often is what someone should do who is worried about job displacement by AI. My answer is: Learn about AI and take control of it, because one of the most important skills in the future will be the ability to tell a computer exactly what you want, so it can do that for you. Coding (or getting AI to code for you) is a great way to do that. When I was working on the course Generative AI for Everyone and needed to generate AI artwork for the background images, I worked with a collaborator who had studied art history and knew the language of art. He prompted Midjourney with terminology based on the historical style, palette, artist inspiration and so on — using the language of art — to get the result he wanted. I didn’t know this language, and my paltry attempts at prompting could not deliver as effective a result. Similarly, scientists, analysts, marketers, recruiters, and people of a wide range of professions who understand the language of software through their knowledge of coding can tell an LLM or an AI-enabled IDE what they want much more precisely, and get much better results. As these tools are continuing to make coding easier, this is the best time yet to learn to code, to learn the language of software, and learn to make computers do exactly what you want them to do. [Original text: https://t.co/HdI3Jb9HmF ]

I'm teaching a new course! AI Python for Beginners is a series of four short courses that teach anyone to code, regardless of current technical skill. We are offering these courses free for a limited time. Generative AI is transforming coding. This course teaches coding in a way that’s aligned with where the field is going, rather than where it has been: (1) AI as a Coding Companion. Experienced coders are using AI to help write snippets of code, debug code, and the like. We embrace this approach and describe best-practices for coding with a chatbot. Throughout the course, you'll have access to an AI chatbot that will be your own coding companion that can assist you every step of the way as you code. (2) Learning by Building AI Applications. You'll write code that interacts with large language models to quickly create fun applications to customize poems, write recipes, and manage a to-do list. This hands-on approach helps you see how writing code that calls on powerful AI models will make you more effective in your work and personal projects. With this approach, beginning programmers can learn to do useful things with code far faster than they could have even a year ago. Knowing a little bit of coding is increasingly helping people in job roles other than software engineers. For example, I've seen a marketing professional write code to download web pages and use generative AI to derive insights; a reporter write code to flag important stories; and an investor automate the initial drafts of contracts. With this course you’ll be equipped to automate repetitive tasks, analyze data more efficiently, and leverage AI to enhance your productivity. If you are already an experienced developer, please help me spread the word and encourage your non-developer friends to learn a little bit of coding. I hope you'll check out the first two short courses here! https://t.co/lTupltSZkT

“Loop engineering” is a hot buzzphrase after mentions of it by Boris Cherny (Claude Code’s creator) and Peter Steinberger (OpenClaw's creator) went viral on social media. Loops are now a key part of how we get AI agents to iterate at length to build software. In this letter, I’d like to share my 3 key loops, shown in the image below, for building 0-to-1 products. These loops guide not just how I build software, but also how I decide what software to build. Agentic coding loop: Given a product specification and optionally a set of evals (that is, a dataset against which to measure performance), we can have an AI agent write code, test its work, and keep iterating until the code is bug-free and meets its specification. This idea of closing the loop took off around the end of last year, and it has been a game changer in enabling coding agents to work longer productively without human intervention. For example, over the weekend, I was building an app for my daughter to practice typing, and my coding agent could easily work for around an hour, using a web browser to check what it had built multiple times before getting back to me, without needing my intervention. The engineering loop executes quickly. Every few minutes, the coding agent might build and test a new version of the software. I hear frequently from developers who are finding new ways to engineer more effective engineering loops. This is an active area of invention! Developer feedback loop: In this loop, a developer examines the current product and steers the coding agent to improve it. Last year, a lot of developers (including me) were acting as the QA (quality assurance) function for our coding agents, manually finding bugs and then asking the agent to fix them. But with coding agents much more able to test their own code, the amount of time we need to spend on this function has decreased significantly. This allows us to make higher-level product decisions, such as what key features to offer, where the UI needs improvement, and so on. The developer-feedback loop operates over time intervals between tens of minutes and hours — that's how frequently a developer might review a product and give feedback. In the case of the typing app, I changed my mind a few times about the visual design, what cat costumes she can unlock as she learns (she loves cats), and the user flow for a grown-up to log in and steer the child's learning experience. When a developer has a clear vision for what to build, it is still a lot of work to translate that vision into a specification for a coding agent to implement. Further, after the developer has seen an implementation, they might update (or perhaps clarify) the spec to steer it toward what they want. If you find that the system repeatedly runs into certain problems, building a set of evals for the agent becomes useful. AI-native teams are increasingly using AI to help shape product direction, for example, automating the gathering and analysis of usage data, summarizing written and verbal customer feedback, or carrying out competitive analysis. However, for pretty much all the products I’m involved in, I see humans as having a significant context advantage over current AI systems — we know a lot more than the AI system about the users and the context the product has to operate in — and thus humans play a critical role. Many people describe this human contribution as “taste,” but I prefer to think of it as humans having a context advantage, since that gives us a clearer path to helping AI systems get better. This also speaks to why this step can’t be automated: So long as the human knows something the AI does not, human-in-the-loop is needed to to inject that knowledge into the system. External feedback loop: This includes a wide range of tactics like asking a few friends for feedback, launching to alpha testers, or putting the code into production with A/B testing. These tactics are usually slow, rarely taking less than hours and sometimes taking days or even weeks. This data informs the developer vision, which in turn continues to drive the detailed product spec, which in turn drives the coding agent. With coding agents speeding up software development, more engineers are starting to play a partial product management role. For many engineers who are growing into this role, the hardest part is shaping the product vision and striking a balance between building (bridging the gap between vision and spec) and getting user feedback to evolve the vision. It is important to do both! I will write more about how to do this in future posts, but for now, I find it encouraging that engineers are playing an expanded role (just as product managers and designers now do more engineering). [Original text: The Batch]

How we prompt AI is very different in 2026 than 2022 when ChatGPT came out. I'm teaching a new course, AI Prompting for Everyone, to help you become an AI power user — whatever your current skill level. It covers skills that apply across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other AI tools. How to use deep research mode for well-researched reports on complex questions. How to give AI the right context, including more documents and images than most people realize you can provide. When to ask AI to think hard for several minutes on important decisions like what car to buy, what to study, or what job to take. And how to use AI to generate images, analyze data, and build simple games and websites. I also cover intuitions about how these models work under the hood, so you know when to trust an answer and when not to. Along the way, you'll see flying squirrels, a creativity test, some of my old family photos, and fireworks. Join me at https://t.co/tcQc4iJAJG

1/The call for a 6 month moratorium on making AI progress beyond GPT-4 is a terrible idea. I'm seeing many new applications in education, healthcare, food, ... that'll help many people. Improving GPT-4 will help. Lets balance the huge value AI is creating vs. realistic risks.