Posts by Blake Coleman
Tokenmaxxing 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 MoreFrom Software Engineer to AI Builder: A Practical Guide
TL;DR FAQ: Can You Move From Software Engineering Into AI Without Starting Over? Some people think “building AI” means you have to be able to train neural networks in a research lab. It doesn’t. The field has split into three distinct layers, and two of them are wide open to people who already write code…
Read MoreArtemis II Is a Signal, Not Just a Mission
TL;DR FAQ: Artemis II is More Than a Mission When Artemis II launched in April 2026, it did more than break a fifty-year drought of human travel beyond low-Earth orbit. It marked a historic pivot from short-term demonstrations of supremacy to the steady, repeatable work of establishing operational infrastructure on another world. At STEM Search…
Read MoreThe Claude Code Leak: What It Actually Means for You (No Matter Your Level)
TL;DR FAQ: The Claude Code Leak and Its Lessons Turns out it wasn’t an elaborate April Fools joke. On March 31, 2026, one of the most sophisticated AI tools ever built accidentally left its front door wide open. Anthropic, the company behind Claude, shipped a routine software update that accidentally included a debugging file nobody…
Read MoreThe End of the Social Contract: When Silicon Valley Became Liable
TL;DR FAQ: Is social media becoming legally accountable for its design? For most of the internet era, social media operated on an unwritten deal. Platforms would connect the world, users would supply the content, and governments would mostly stay out of the way. The understanding was simple: these companies were neutral pipes, not responsible actors.…
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