Welcome back to The AI Shift, our weekly dive into different aspects of AI’s impact on the labour market. This week: with recent advances in agentic AI triggering an outbreak of existential crises in the social science community, we take a look at what rapidly improving coding agents are doing to the production of quantitative research and the self-conception of those performing it.

John writes

To date, much of the focus on AI-exposed jobs has used software developers as the archetypal case of an occupation whose constituent tasks feel disconcertingly close to the capabilities of leading large language models. But as those capabilities have expanded, the list of professions whose incumbents are glancing warily over their shoulder has grown.