Cheap Competence, New Frontier

Hello, and happy Sunday! This week we published “After Automation,” Dan Shipper’s argument that even when you automate as much as we have, there’s always a new frame for humans to hand to the models. COO Brandon Gell and new head of marketing Douglas Brundage tested the idea by moving their agent work into public internal Slack channels and watching the lurkers gather. Anthropic’s reported $300 million acquisition of developer-tools startup Stainless rides on the same bet—that an agent can’t use a company’s API unless a human has first made it easy to use, which is what Dan and CEO Alex Rattray talked through on AI & I months before the deal.

Scroll down for two takes from the ground at Google I/O—Jack Cheng on why Google is aiming at everyday users, not the AI crowd, and Alex Duffy on Demis Hassabis’s claim that AGI is a few years out—and what Google’s been doing to take us there. Plus, a mini-Vibe Check on Gas City from head of tech consulting Mike Taylor and a Grok-based “banger classifier” Katie Parrott is running her X drafts through, and Katie’s playbook for new grads facing AI-driven entry-level cuts at Meta and beyond—copy-paste career-coach prompt included. We’re off Monday for U.S. Memorial Day and back in your inbox on Tuesday.—Kate Lee

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Knowledge base

“After Automation” by Dan Shipper: We’ve automated as much as possible at Every—agents write the code, draft emails, and compile the newsletter—and yet there’s more human work to do than ever. Dan’s new report traces what happens when cheap competence floods the market and argues there’s always a new frame for humans to hand the models. Read this for the case that progress expands human work rather than ending it.

“Google I/O: Agents, Agents, Agents” by Jack Cheng/Context Window: Google’s I/O keynote rebuilt search and assistants around agents—a default AI Mode, the 24/7 Gemini Spark, and a Universal Cart co-built with Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft—all on Gemini 3.5 Flash, pitched as Opus 4.7-level intelligence at four times the speed and half the cost. Read Jack Cheng’s report from the field for why Google’s I/O bets on distribution over benchmarks.

“Notes From the Foothills of the Singularity” by Alex Duffy/Playtesting: At Google I/O, Demis Hassabis placed AGI “just a few years” out and put its total impact at 10 times the Industrial Revolution. Alex Duffy frames the other side of the story through his Uber driver back from Mountain View: a 54-year-old construction worker who knows the city by heart and is worried his job is next. Read this for the tension between Google’s compute-at-scale ambitions and the workers whose ground it’s reshaping.