Posts by Blake Coleman
Built to Bend: Southern Auto Alley After the EV Boom
Part I, The EV pullback is revealing something bigger about Southern Auto Alley Built to Bend is a five-part STEM Search Group research series examining how Southern Auto Alley is adapting after the EV boom. Each installment explores a different part of the story, from manufacturing strategy and technology to hiring and long-term competitiveness. TL;DR…
Read MoreMore than 200 economists are asking the same questions we’ve been asking. You should be asking them too.
TL;DR FAQ: Why are economists ramping up talks about AI and jobs? ▼ Q: What happened? A: More than 200 economists and AI researchers, including 16 Nobel laureates, signed a statement urging governments and businesses to prepare for AI’s economic impact. ▼ Q: Are they predicting mass unemployment? A: No. Their message is that AI…
Read MorePaul Graham’s X Post Raises a Bigger Question Than AI Cheating
TL;DR Q: What happened?A: A Brown econ class scored much higher on a take-home midterm than an in-person final. Graham’s take: most of the class cheated. Q: What’s the real signal?A: It’s about to get a lot harder to tell who understands the material from who just produced the right answer, in school and in…
Read MoreLinkedIn is a social network that sometimes talks about work
TL;DR FAQ: Is LinkedIn still a professional network? There used to be a deal on the internet. Twitter was for chaos. Instagram was for envy. Facebook was for your uncle’s political opinions and photos of lasagna. TikTok was for the algorithm to figure you out faster than your family ever did. YouTube was for creators,…
Read MoreTokenmaxxing vs. Token Optimization: Which Camp Is Right?
TL;DR FAQ: Tokenmaxxing vs. Token Optimization — Which Approach Is Right for Your Team? A new term emerged in engineering circles in late 2025: tokenmaxxing. If you have not heard it yet, you will. And depending on who you ask, it is either the smartest way to work with AI right now or a cautionary…
Read MoreNot Broken, But Misfiring: AI, Artificial Friction, and the Future of Work
TL;DR FAQ: Why is the AI-Driven Labor Market “Misfiring” in 2026? For years, the story has been simple. There are jobs. There are candidates. And somehow, they are not finding each other. The default explanation has been a skills gap. Workers do not have what employers need. Employers cannot find qualified people. End of story.…
Read MoreThe World Needs More Grok
No, not that Grok. The one that’s been around long before that. The one right in our backyard that, somehow, Blake Coleman had never made it to. That’s fixed now. We won’t be missing it again. Most conferences follow the same script. You pay a few hundred dollars, fly somewhere convenient, and sit in a…
Read MoreAI Layoffs Are Not the Whole Story. Strategy Is.
TL;DR FAQ: Are AI Layoffs and Corporate Restructuring Redefining the 2026 Job Market? If you step back and look at the recent wave of layoffs, something feels different. It isn’t the headlines. We’ve seen these cycles before. We’ve seen the boom-and-bust of the dot-com era and the lean years of 2008. What feels different this…
Read MoreMIT Has Shown Us the Iceberg Beneath Microsoft’s X-Ray: What 151 Million Simulated Workers Reveal About AI’s Hidden Labor Market
With new data from MIT, we follow-up on our post titled Microsoft Research Just Mapped the Future of Work: What 200,000 AI Conversations Across 923 Jobs Reveal TL;DR FAQ: MIT’s Project Iceberg Fills In What the Microsoft Study Couldn’t See Late last year, we walked through what Microsoft Research found when it analyzed 200,000 real…
Read MoreRobots Can’t Feel a Thing. Here’s Why That’s a Problem.
TL;DR FAQ: Can Robots Actually Feel? The Truth About Tactile Intelligence in 2026 Imagine asking a coworker to hand you a ripe tomato. They walk over, reach out, and crush it instantly. Not out of malice. They just had no idea how hard they were squeezing. That is the daily reality of most robots in…
Read More