Confluence: AI, Leadership, and Communication

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -17:22 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. This week Fable comes back, and with it a set of thresholds worth naming.

Midjourney prompt: A Bauhaus interpretation of AI agents infiltrating an org chart Welcome to Confluence. Here’s what has our attention this week at the intersection of generative AI, leadership, and corporate communication: Fable Returns The Downsides of Putting Agents on Org Charts How Much Time Are You Spending Botsitting? A Brief Note on AI Writing and Logic And it means the crossing of multiple thresholds.

This week the leading labs start telling us how the rest of us will use AI. A new OpenAI paper tracks agentic coding tools spreading fast beyond engineers: active users up more than fivefold in the first half of 2026, the fastest growth outside software developers, and the median OpenAI researcher now generating fifty times the monthly output they did last November. Inside OpenAI, the tool has nearly replaced everyday ChatGPT.

Welcome to Confluence. Here’s what has our attention this week at the intersection of generative AI, leadership, and corporate communication: • We’ll All Be Using Coding Tools Soon Enough • The Shifting Value of Human Expertise We’ll All Be Using Coding Tools Soon Enough The leading labs forecast how the rest of us will soon use AI.

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -16:25 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. For three years, enterprise AI ran on a simple promise: a flat fee, use it as much as you want. This week, Microsoft quietly ended that era.

Midjourney prompt: Photorealistic image of dawn light at the summer solstice over an open field, low golden sun, long shadows, soft haze, warm natural lighting, shallow depth of field Welcome to Confluence. Here’s what has our attention this week at the intersection of generative AI, leadership, and corporate communication: The Token Allocation Era Begins Update Your Priors Entry-Level Roles Level Up The Returns to Management Microsoft’s Copilot Cowork and the changing economics of enterprise AI.

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -18:56 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. For three days, the most capable AI model ever released to the public was sitting in our chat window. And then it was gone. On June 9, Anthropic launched Claude 5 Fable, a “Mythos-class” model that outperformed everything before it and felt less like a tool than a small studio you could hand a project and trust to deliver.

Midjourney prompt: A brilliant source of light contained behind colossal closed gates, beams escaping through narrow gaps into a dim landscape, painterly, chiaroscuro, blue and gold Welcome to Confluence. Earlier this week, we published a piece written entirely by Claude 5 Fable, the first publicly available model in Anthropic’s new Mythos class of models. We’re glad we published that when we did, because by Friday night, Anthropic had revoked general access to Fable due to a government order.

ChatGPT image prompt: Abstract painting of two rivers converging and accelerating into a single luminous current, deep violet and warm gold impasto, gestural confident brushwork, the horizon line at the exact midpoint of the canvas, Gerhard Richter meets Helen Frankenthaler Editors’ note: Last December 28th we had Claude read all our 2025 editions and write a year in review. Yesterday, Anthropic released Claude Fable 5, the general-release version of their powerful new Mythos model.

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -19:46 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. We open on a paradox at the heart of the AI coding boom. Engineers are racing to “token-maxx,” companies like Uber are burning through a full year’s AI budget in four months, yet a new NBER study of more than 100,000 developers finds the tools generate dramatically more code while barely changing how much finished software actually ships. We trace why, and where the real bottlenecks live.