It’s hard to tell AI news from AI hype at the best of times, but the most recent surge around agents, triggered by many developers embracing Claude Code a couple of months ago, feels like something different. With the viral freakout over Moltbook, the agent social network, and the Super Bowl ad slap fight between OpenAI and Anthropic, AI has escalated to a new level of mainstream attention.

Everyone’s forgotten about the AI bubble and is instead dancing around the AI “inflection point,” when AI in general and agents in particular begin to take over huge swaths of knowledge work, with massive consequences for the economy and the workforce. The recent sell-off of SaaS stocks is an indication of how seriously the industry takes this.

For journalists, all this mainstream AI noise, coupled with the steady drumbeat of layoffs in the media industry,........

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