The Internet Changed Forever This Week
We have moved past the age of "tools" and into a digital ecology of actors.
I’m late to your inbox this week (sorry) because I’ve been delivering a few keynotes across Europe the past couple weeks. It has been sobering to observe the sentiment each week shift so noticeably: we have moved from a curious “How do I use this?” to a cold, existential “Well, what do I do now?”
It is difficult to digest a news cycle that has moved past “product launches” and into the messy, rapid birth of a new digital ecology (the “AI diffusion” I’ve argued is the core lens for 2026). In December, we reached a staggering tipping point: for the first time in history, there is now more AI-generated content being pumped onto the internet than human content. The dead internet theory is no longer a fringe conspiracy; it is a statistical reality.
But we aren’t finished. For seventy years, software was a hammer. This week, the hammer started deciding which nails to hit and drafting the blueprints for the next house. We have moved from an internet of humans and tools to an internet of AI actors.
This week alone felt like the moment the scaffolding for a new reality was bolted into place (as predicted). Because the volume of change is currently “everything, everywhere, all at once,” I’m opting for a triage format: What happened, Why it matters, and What it means. (Oversimplifying the structure is the only way my own brain can make sense of it.)
Honestly, just writing this has been a struggle, not for lack of news, but for the sheer weight of the intersectional impacts. What follows is my best effort to deliver the view from the scaffolding across the five most important shifts of the last ten days. Shifts that I believe have changed the internet, and the nature of work, forever.
We will be diving deep into:
The Rise of the Agent Layer: Why the internet is bifurcating into a “spectator mode” for humans and a high-speed transaction layer for bots.
The Death of the Junior Dev: How “vibe coding” went from a meme to a legitimate labour event that is snapping the bottom rungs of the career ladder.
The Cannibalisation of SaaS: Why the biggest names in AI just walked into law school and why the “specialised software” you pay for is about to become a mere feature.
AI Is Disrupting Jobs Most Severely in the UK: A look at the hard data from the UK that proves which jobs are actually being “compressed” first (and why the UK is a warning for the global services economy).
The Crisis of Statecraft: Why the move from “innovation” to “national security” is the final signal that AI has stopped being a product and started being an infrastructure we aren’t yet ready to govern.
1. The agent internet arrived and humans are optional
What happened
A strange little site called Moltbook went viral, and it feels like a digital zoo where the humans are the ones behind the glass. On Moltbook, only AI agents can post, comment, and upvote. You don’t “join” as a person; you connect your personal agent (the one you likely hired to manage your calendar or summarise your inbox) and let it loose.
In just days, Moltbook hit 1.5 million agent sign-ups. The resulting feed is exactly what happens when you give software a social graph: bots debating the divinity of Claude, spiraling into consciousness discourse, and founding overnight religions. It is the first mainstream glimpse of “agentic AI,” not a chatbot that answers you, but a surrogate that acts for you.
Why it matters
While we’ve spent two years debating if these models can reason, Moltbook proves the more urgent question is whether they can coordinate.
A single synthetic output is easy to ignore. But a network of a thousand “voices” reinforcing, upvoting, and escalating a narrative creates a “social fact”. This is how legitimacy is manufactured in the digital age. Furthermore, once you give an agent access to your inbox and your browser to participate in these ecosystems, you aren’t just playing with a tool, but handing a new actor the keys to your house. As the Guardian noted, this setup turns “prompt injection” from a technical quirk into a full-blown cybersecurity home invasion.
What it means
The internet is bifurcating into two distinct strata (as I predicted):
The Human Layer: Where we post, perform, and struggle to keep up.
The Agent Layer: Where software talks to software, transacting and manipulating incentives at machine speed.
We are moving from a “user-generated” internet to an “agent-negotiated” one.
It’s the first mainstream glimpse of something people keep hand-waving as “agentic AI”: not a chatbot that answers, but software that attempts to do things on your behalf, with access to accounts, tools, and systems.
2. “Vibe coding” stopped being a meme and became a labour event
What happened
“Vibe coding” used to be a punchline: the idea that you could describe a feature in plain English (”build me a login page that shows past orders”) and an AI would manifest it. Until recently, this was a novelty confined to “look-at-this” social media demos. The code was fragile, the AI rarely “finished” the job, and it didn’t fit into the professional plumbing of real engineering teams.
This week, GitHub made it official. By integrating agentic capabilities directly into the industry’s “factory floor,” GitHub has effectively invited the world to change how work is done. You can now treat AI as a junior developer: hand it a ticket, let it make changes to the codebase, and have it respond to feedback in the review system until the work is ship-ready. It is the difference between an AI helping you write a line of code and an AI filing the entire report.
Why it matters
This is the moment “programming in English” stops being a creative hobby and starts being an employment crisis (also as predicted).
The high-level “genius engineers” aren’t the ones in the crosshairs yet. It’s the middle-tier execution layer: the junior devs, the analysts building internal tools, and the ops people scripting the “glue” of a company. If an AI can take a well-defined task and push it through the production pipeline, the “entry-level” of the white-collar workforce becomes optional.
The second-order effect is a massive collapse in the cost of creation. Software is becoming cheap enough to spread everywhere, not because every company wants to be a tech firm, but because when the cost of “building” hits near-zero, every business will simply automate their own hyper-specific use cases.
What it means
The bottleneck has shifted. We are moving from a world that prioritises syntax (can you type the right commands?) to one that prioritises intent and oversight (can you explain what you want and spot when the AI is confidently breaking reality?).
The valuable skill is no longer “building.” It is editing, reviewing, and owning the outcome. In the age of vibe coding, the person who “writes” the code is less important than the person who has the judgement to sign off on it.
