| Welcome back to The AI Shift, our weekly newsletter about how AI is changing the world of work. This week, we thought we’d hand the reins over to you, the readers. One of the things we have really enjoyed about this project has been the messages and comments we get from subscribers — some of them agreeing with us, some of them disagreeing, and many of them simply sharing how AI is changing their own jobs and professions. Here is a selection we’ve found interesting in recent weeks, which we thought might resonate with others too. 
© Efi Chalikopoulou Given that translators and software developers are probably the two white-collar professions which have already felt the biggest effects of AI disruption, it’s perhaps not a surprise that we’ve heard a lot from them lately. <img width='1' height='1' style='display:none;border-style:none;' alt=' src='https://images.passendo.com/t/2/57194/[email protected]/6371744939964449/0/0'><img width='1' height='1' style='display:none;border-style:none;' alt=' src='https://images.passendo.com/extt/2/57194/[email protected]/6371744939964449?pid=1'><img width='1' height='1' style='display:none;border-style:none;' alt=' src='https://images.passendo.com/extt/2/57194/[email protected]/6371744939964449?pid=2'><img width='1' height='1' style='display:none;border-style:none;' alt=' src='https://images.passendo.com/extt/2/57194/[email protected]/6371744939964449?pid=3'><img width='1' height='1' style='display:none;border-style:none;' alt=' src='https://images.passendo.com/extt/2/57194/[email protected]/6371744939964449?pid=4'> |  | First, here’s a reader pushing back on our assertion that AI is making the job of experienced translators harder and more mechanical, but seems to be having a different and more positive effect for senior software developers. “Many of the translators’ experiences described in [last week’s newsletter] are familiar from my own work. I’m a software engineer. The article frames the challenges faced by translators as ‘opposite’ to those of software engineers. In fact, our jobs have also been made harder; the most creative activities of the job are being replaced by the tedium of checking machine output; and as we write less code, we feel our skills atrophy. Compared to before, the work offers less scope to demonstrate style and originality. We also face downward pressure on career opportunities and rates of pay. It seems that large language models are having similar effects on white-collar labour across different industries and professions.” Joshua Mostafa And here’s a reader who makes a point we hadn’t considered: that as AI increases the pace of software development, that will lead to higher demand for local hires, rather than for developers in lower-cost locations. I think you are missing a large part of the developing picture. The majority of developers used by large UK and US companies are not in those countries, they are supplied by services firms in near or far shore locations. As the adoption of LLM development grows, several things happen, one of them is development time lines collapse, placing a far higher emphasis on agile practices; sprints that were once measured in weeks are now completed in hours. Co-location or at least time zone aligned and access-able (can get to the office) become far more important. As one commentator mentioned, when you used to have a team of 50 developers but now only need 5, labour arbitrage (near/far shore vs onshore) becomes irrelevant and is overtaken by the amplified needs of greater agility. Based on this I would expect demand for local talent to be robust to strong at the expense of the services companies that are used to supply the near/far shore labour. And here is a reader on the growing importance of mentorship and coaching as a relatively junior software developer. I can offer my experience as someone working in a junior-ish capacity at the moment, using Claude daily. The junior-senior hiring bifurcation highlighted in the article makes sense. LLMs are superb at spitting out small chunks of reasonably good code if asked to do a reasonably specific thing. This was what junior developers used to do. My day to day focus is now on “architectural” decisions (I.e. how do we best assemble all of those small chunks of code to do something complicated?) I’m fortunate in that I’m being coached by a senior developer on this. This aspect of development is often overlooked by non-technical leaders because, yes, in the short term, you *can* mash a load of LLM-generated code together and be somewhat confident it’ll do the thing you’ve asked it to do… but you run out of runway quickly as your product becomes more complex. It’s also a non-starter for anything that could end with a lawsuit. That’s why seniors are still very much in demand. TL;DR - Human developers are probably not going away any time soon, but a gap is almost certainly opening up between those who only know how to write code, and those who know what code needs to be written. We’ve also heard from translators who responded to last week’s newsletter about the rise of “machine translation post-editing” work, which is now distributed to freelancers by agencies. These readers all offer some hopeful insight into the ways in which human experts still have a future in the profession (and by extension, perhaps, some lessons for those of us in adjacent fields). “It’s striking how many generalist translators in mid-market segments — jumping from one field to another, working through translation agencies — have been hit by growing use of AI. But that’s not the whole picture. There are also highly specialized markets for expert translators working directly with risk-averse clients in critical areas, [for example] document types and situations where a flawed translation can create serious legal, reputational or financial exposure — and, in some cases, a threat to life and limb. The translation agencies lowering prices and farming out machine-generated translation for post-editing at rock-bottom rates are rarely present in these segments, since their business model is built for volume. But for genuinely specialized translators prepared to head over and mingle with demanding clients, who have serious writing skills and have invested the time to develop deep expertise, prospects are not all that bleak. (A bit like journalists, perhaps?)” “There is no denying that the translation profession has become more challenging. Once upon a time, translators were the gatekeepers between languages. If you wanted to know what a page of German said, you had to hire a translator. Those days are gone. For basic cross-lingual comprehension, LLMs and DeepL now perform remarkably well. However, while translation tout court is increasingly commoditised, the combination of translation expertise, deep subject-matter knowledge, excellent service and strong writing skills remains very much in demand. I struggle to see that changing anytime soon. Ultimately, clients are not paying for words to be transferred from one language to another; they’re paying for confidence in the end result.” And finally, we enjoyed this email from Abdu Issa in Houston on the nature of writing: “AI is not uniformly disrupting writing. It is destabilizing a particular expectation—that writing should transparently reflect an individual voice. Where that expectation is strong, AI feels threatening. Where writing is already understood as the manipulation of language within a system, it feels like a tool…For example, my other language, Arabic, operates with a structural distinction between spoken dialects and Modern Standard Arabic, the language of writing. Writing in Arabic is not a direct transcription of speech; it is a conversion into a formal system with its own grammar and vocabulary. Linguistic and psycholinguistic research reflects this: written Arabic behaves more like a second language in processing—slower, more effortful, and dependent on conscious control. Literacy itself is often described as overcoming the “intrusion” of the spoken vernacular. In that context, writing is unambiguously understood as transformation. The writer does not simply “sound like themselves.” They produce language that meets the requirements of a standard. English contains the same transformation-heavy domains but tends to frame writing, especially in literary and educational contexts, as the expression of an authentic voice. That expectation shapes how AI is perceived.” It’s a real privilege to get such thoughtful and insightful contributions, and I’m certainly rowing back on my framing of a neat dichotomy between translators and developers after reading these. It will also be interesting to dig into some of our survey data on how coders and other knowledge workers are thinking about AI when the next wave of our AI workforce tracker lands. The argument that AI will favour local talent is certainly something we will continue to keep a close eye on — just this week we saw some early evidence of a rowback on IT offshoring. Finally, a quick note to say that The AI Shift has just won “Best Newsletter” at the global WAN-IFRA Digital Media Awards! So you all obviously have excellent taste. Here is an obligatory cheesy photo with our brilliant producer Georgina Quach. Our colleague Madhumita Murgia wrote a fascinating magazine story about Anthropic which is well worth your time (Sarah) Wharton professor Ethan Mollick has a fascinating Substack article on his early experiences working with Anthropic’s new Mythos-class model, and how it represents a real step change from its predecessors (John) <img width='1' height='1' style='display:none;border-style:none;' alt=' src='https://images.passendo.com/t/2/57834/[email protected]/5955651466558232/0/0'><img width='1' height='1' style='display:none;border-style:none;' alt=' src='https://images.passendo.com/extt/2/57834/[email protected]/5955651466558232?pid=1'><img width='1' height='1' style='display:none;border-style:none;' alt=' src='https://images.passendo.com/extt/2/57834/[email protected]/5955651466558232?pid=2'><img width='1' height='1' style='display:none;border-style:none;' alt=' src='https://images.passendo.com/extt/2/57834/[email protected]/5955651466558232?pid=3'><img width='1' height='1' style='display:none;border-style:none;' alt=' src='https://images.passendo.com/extt/2/57834/[email protected]/5955651466558232?pid=4'> |  | |