AI jobs up 15%
Recent job statistics cited by Leo show engineering and tech openings are up roughly 15%, suggesting AI has so far increased rather than reduced the number of tech roles.
Snapshot · This Week in Tech (Audio)
TWiT 1092: You Brought a Knife to a Wolf Fight - Apple Accuses OpenAI of Trade Secret Theft
Explore episode
Jul 13, 2026
Where this was said
Career Advice, AI Jobs, and Leo's Son's Sandwich Shop
At 1:02:13 · chapter starts 59:10
A wide-ranging conversation about careers in an AI age surfaces around the Xbox layoffs. Wesley argues entry-level roles are evaporating to AI while the VRP formula squeezes out senior workers, creating a hollowed-out workforce. Leo cites a Ramp study showing AI-investing companies grew employment by over 10%, but Wesley cautions against reading too much into top-line numbers. The panel agrees the best advice for children is to pursue passion, not predicted job markets. Patrick admits his kids use a Nintendo Switch more than any computer, asking whether he should be teaching them to code. Leo pivots to his son Henry Laporte, whose Salt Hank sandwich shop in New York City received its fourth New York Times review — a rave, despite the paper's rule limiting sandwich shops to one star. Henry was reportedly more pleased about being ranked number one on the Belly food app.
Microsoft's VRP Age Formula Is a New Tool to Eliminate Older Workers
Microsoft's voluntary retirement program used an age-plus-tenure calculation to determine eligibility, which Wesley Faulkner argues is a deliberately engineered mechanism to remove older workers while sidestepping age discrimination law. With entry-level roles already disappearing to AI, this new tool squeezes the workforce from both ends.
Ramp study: 10% more jobs
A Ramp study found companies making the largest AI investments grew employment by more than 10% compared to companies that had not adopted AI.
Agentic AI and the Problem of Determinism
Lou Maresca and Wesley Faulkner break down a key agentic AI problem: some behaviors are deterministic (code always does the same thing) and some are probabilistic (the AI might read your docs, or might not). The fix is to encode critical recurring tasks as code or scripts, not as instructions — because code is always causal, AI instructions aren't.
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