It’s certainly the case right now, even in a domain like software engineering where the extent of AI capabilities is on full display, that the human-AI combination, the “cyborg,” is superior to AI alone—not least because you still need to tell the coding agent your preferences, or your company’s preferences, or your customer’s preferences. This is good for human labor, because it means that workers are more productive, and as long as demand for the goods they produce is elastic, we should be pretty optimistic about human labor under this regime. (This is probably why the number of job postings for software engineers has increased in the twelve months since Claude Code was first released.) The faster that AI capabilities advance, of course, the quicker we’ll tend to see complementarity diminish: I don’t think that the cyborg era is necessarily a permanent one. The world where human complementarity disappears entirely isn’t a realistic one: it’s a corner solution where AI is so superior at every conceivable ta…