The Future of Productivity: Demographic Trends and Labor Shortage

Explore how demographic trends and labor shortages are reshaping productivity across industries, revealing challenges and future implications for the workforce.

“Kedrosky and Norlin believe demographic trends will ultimately lead to a drastic decline in overall productivity as industries like retail, manufacturing, and health care struggle to fill open positions. There’s some indication that those trends are, in fact, here to stay. The overall labor force participation rate is still about a percentage point lower than it was in February 2020. In a workforce the size of the U.S.’s that can equal several million workers."—A.I. came at ‘perfect time’ to save the economy, VC says | Fortune

Featured writing

Why customer tools are organized wrong

This article reveals a fundamental flaw in how customer support tools are designed—organizing by interaction type instead of by customer—and explains why this fragmentation wastes time and obscures the full picture you need to help users effectively.

Infrastructure shapes thought

The tools you build determine what kinds of thinking become possible. On infrastructure, friction, and building deliberately for thought rather than just throughput.

Server-Side Dashboard Architecture: Why Moving Data Fetching Off the Browser Changes Everything

How choosing server-side rendering solved security, CORS, and credential management problems I didn't know I had.

Books

The Work of Being (in progress)

A book on AI, judgment, and staying human at work.

The Practice of Work (in progress)

Practical essays on how work actually gets done.

Recent writing

Dev reflection - February 07, 2026

I've been thinking about friction. Not the dramatic kind—not the system crash, not the project that fails spectacularly. I mean the quiet kind. The accumulation of small things that don't quite wor...

Dev reflection - February 06, 2026

I want to talk about the difference between a system that works and a system that's ready. These aren't the same thing. The gap between them is where most projects stall out—not from failure, but f...

Dev reflection - February 05, 2026

I want to talk about something I keep running into: the moment when you realize the outside of something no longer matches the inside. And what that actually costs.

View all writing →