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Then you wait.
You refresh your emails every 5 seconds.

Then someone not only buys but hits 5★ review.

And you’re like…
Cool. Excellent.
I will now base my entire self-worth on this.

Thank you to everyone who supports the real humans making things — we really care ❤️.

If any of this sounds familiar, we might need to talk.

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“She outworks everyone. And she’ll never ask for a raise. Meet your new AI employee. Always on, never sick and no HR required.”

I’ve stared at this advert for two days and I still feel sick to my stomach.

Let’s start with the obvious: they made the AI a woman.

A woman who never complains, never gets sick, never asks for more.

No HR required means: no accountability. No recourse. No consequences.

This is what some men think the ideal employee looks like. Someone who performs endlessly. Asks for nothing. Has no body, no needs, no rights.

And they just raised £20million last week to do it.

The dehumanisation of workers. The feminisation of servitude. The removal of every protection humans fought decades to win.

Dressed up as innovation.

We are living through a moment where women are still fighting for pay equity. Where the gender pay gap is a documented, persistent, structural failure.

And someone looked at that fight and thought: what if we just… removed the woman’s ability to ask? And put it on a billboard?

I’m not against AI. I work in this space. But I am against this.

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Some tech leaders are full of BS.

For a start, the research disagrees.

Stanford found productivity sharply declines after 50 hours a week. After 55 hours, there are no measurable gains at all.

You’re just burning people for nothing.

Sustained overwork leads to burnout, cognitive fatigue and disengagement, the exact opposite of the creativity and focus you actually need to innovate.

Even China’s supreme court declared 996 illegal after workers started dying from it. Literally dying.

And we’re celebrating it. WTF?

Here’s what the research actually shows:

• Creative hobbies outside work improve problem solving.
• Rest reduces cortisol and cognitive fatigue.
• People with hobbies burn out less.
• HBR found hobbies make you a more effective leader.

I draw raccoons every day. Not because I want to Be An Artist. Because it’s the only hour where nobody gets anything from me and my brain gets to rest.

The human brain is not a limitless resource. It needs rest to perform.

With AI doing more of the grunt work, we should be talking about maximising rest, creativity and innovation.

Not treating humans like machines.

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“It is a terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have.”

— Ursula Le Guin

I think about this quote a lot. Especially when the world feels so turbulent.

It feels like AI is changing everything. Jobs, roles, how we build, how we work. It’s fast. It’s noisy. Sometimes it’s genuinely frightening.

But here’s what I keep coming back to: human kindness is one thing we can’t automate away.

No model replaces it. No efficiency drive optimises for it. No organisation can fake it.

And if we’re honest, tech has never been that good at it. We celebrate speed, scale, disruption. We forget the people doing the work. We forget to build communities that look out for each other.

In our teams. In our hiring. In our feedback. In our day-to-day conversations.

So let’s start now. Whatever happens next with AI, with tech, with the world — be the kind one.

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For example, a large global bank is reportedly considering tens of thousands of job cuts due to ‘AI efficiencies’.

And it gets worse. A recent report found that 86% of workers most vulnerable to this so-called AI displacement are women. The same women already fighting for equal pay, equal seats, and equal opportunities.

Let’s think critically about what’s actually happening here.

Companies are using AI as a convenient cover story for cuts that were coming anyway. Pandemic overhiring, structural problems, underperforming business units, market pressure, margin pressure — the list goes on.

The data doesn’t back it up either:
💡 DX found AI in software engineering leads to 10% gains, not 10x or more.
💡 A global payment provider replaced 700 people with AI. Quality tanked. They quietly rehired humans.
💡 Researchers at Oxford Economics, Forrester and CNBC agree: real displacement would show up as massive productivity gains. It hasn’t.

When you see a company cut thousands of jobs and frame it as ‘AI efficiencies’, ask:
🍔 Were they thriving before AI came along, empowering their people?
💩 Or were they already in trouble, needing a convenient press release?

P.S. Raise your hand if you thought ‘AI-washing’ was using Claude to vibe code your washing machine.

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It does NOT say 75% of programmers will lose their jobs to AI. It’s just what’s doing the rounds on the internet right now. Classic.

That 75% figure is called Observed Exposure. And it is not — I repeat, NOT — a redundancy prediction.
💡 It’s a measure of how many of a programmer’s tasks AI is actively being used for in professional settings.

So here’s a different way you can read that number: it’s a 75% opportunity.

Based on the report, AI isn’t coming for your job. But it might just free you from the 75% of your time you spend writing YAML.

Here’s what the report actually found:
✅ No meaningful increase in unemployment for ‘highly exposed’ workers since ChatGPT launched.
✅ The gap between what AI can theoretically do and what it’s actually doing is enormous — much opportunity to be had.
✅ 30% of workers have zero AI exposure at all (wild).
✅ Hiring of 22–25 year olds into exposed roles has slowed slightly — but the authors themselves say it’s barely statistically significant.

Don’t panic. Check the facts in the full report. AI misinformation isn’t helping anyone — it’s feral out there on the interwebs.

P.S. It’s been a while since I got some cursed AI art. Please enjoy this raccoon with their clipboard backwards. A+.

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LinkedIn’s 2026 State of Women in Leadership report landed recently, and one number stopped me cold: in tech, the VP-to-C-Suite cliff sits at 39%.

Nearly 4 in 10 women who fought their way to VP don’t make it through that final door. And that’s the average. For some functions it’s considerably worse.

Worse still, women with doctorates face a 33% drop from workforce to leadership. The biggest gap of any education group.

I believed the answer was to prove myself harder. Some days I still do it.

It’s not you. It was never you.

If you’re wondering why you’re not progressing despite doing everything right, it’s time to stop auditing yourself and start auditing the system holding you back.

And if you can — a kind word, a recommendation, a hand up to another woman at that cliff — do something with it.

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If I give someone without engineering knowledge an AI agent, does that make them an engineer?
❌ No. It makes them a baby with a dangerous power tool.

At best, they manage small, well-defined, low-risk tasks. Like someone using a drill to hang a shelf. Fine. The house probably won’t fall down.

At worst, they’re shipping dangerous code they can’t review, debug, secure, or maintain.

And that’s not even the scariest part. The scariest part is apparent success.

The code runs.
The demo looks great.
Until it meets real users. Real load.
And then the house falls down.

Then an actual engineer opens the codebase and you have to pay them double to cover the therapy fees.

AI is power. But power without knowledge is dangerous.
Maybe don’t hand the baby a chainsaw.

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