Co-Existence and the End of Co-Intelligence
One Useful Thing · Ethan Mollick · 2026-06-04
Ethan Mollick announces his new book Co-Existence, arguing that AI has moved beyond the chatbot-assistant era into one where autonomous agents sometimes outperform humans, requiring ongoing negotiation of human-AI working relationships rather than a one-time adaptation.
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Extraction
Topics: human-ai-collaborationagentic-aiai-adoptionai-writing-tools
Claims
- AI has transitioned from chatbot assistants to autonomous agents that outperform humans in important areas of work, particularly software development.
- Anthropic reported that AI now writes 80% of its code, with individual developers shipping 8x more, representing a transformative productivity shift.
- AI is increasingly becoming not just a tool but also a reader, critic, and gatekeeper that mediates whether human-created content reaches its audience.
- Long-form AI writing remains weak—it struggles with narrative, has identifiable textual tells, and is dull to read at length.
- Old prompt-injection tricks to bias AI recommendations are no longer effective and now feel exploitative given how sophisticated models have become.
Key quotes
One study suggested they led to seventeen times more code being written and today Anthropic reported that AI now writes 80% of its code, with each developer shipping 8x more.
When should you refuse AI's help, even when it is offering? When should you hand over the keys entirely? And what do you do when the AI is no longer just your assistant, but your reader, your critic, and the gatekeeper standing between your work and its audience?
Working with AI that is sometimes better than you, and sometimes hilariously worse, is not a problem you solve once. It is a relationship you negotiate, and re-negotiate, as the models get ever better.