Beware the 20x Engineer, 2026.05.11

Alex Hanna: Welcome everyone to Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, where we seek catharsis in this age of AI hype. Bender: Along the way, we learn to always read the footnotes, and each time we think we've reached peak AI hype, the summit of Bullshit Mountain, we discover there's worse to come.

It goes beyond the title with direct discussion of alex, emily, hanna, including: We find the worst of it and pop it with the sharpest needles we can find.

1. 01Bender: First, we're gonna look at a more general prediction about the economics of chatbots, and then we'll spend some time looking specifically at these productivity agents in so
2. 02The AI bros like to tell us that computer programming is the height of human achievement, but honestly, it's more like the one application where maybe their tools could be helpful
3. 03Rather, it takes an outside survey of economists' expectations and runs it through our model to show possible scenarios." Okay, I don't know what any of that means