Axios CTO is living your coming AI reality
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Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
Dan Cox, Axios' chief technology officer, isn't a journalist, but his AI insights are vital to our readers. We want to show, not just tell, the impact AI is having on companies — in this case, Axios.
- So we asked Dan to share what it's like to live the AI revolution. What his team is experiencing will soon hit lawyers, marketers, accountants, consultants ... and journalists. Here's what Dan told us:
One of our best engineers recently completed a project similar to one he delivered a year ago.
- Last year, it took three weeks. This past week, he used AI-based "agent teams" and completed the same amount of work in 37 minutes.
Why it matters: This is the reality of the AI hype you read and hear about. Yes, coding is the first big place AI is hitting hardest. But I see every day how it will unfold across most other areas.
Anticipating this AI shift six months ago, we refocused our product and tech organization, shrinking from 63 to 43 people to operate more nimbly in this new environment.
- The team doubled its output in January and will double that again this month. We're doing exponentially more ... with dramatically fewer people.
The big picture: In the tech world, especially in media, we were always constrained by what we call "technical debt" — the backlog of work any organization faces but never quite gets around to doing.
- Tech debt is gone. Not because we solved it, but because AI just made it irrelevant.
- The Axios backlog, which was 12 months long, will be gone in months. Then the work really starts, as engineers become builders and begin to think beyond the limits of a request list.
Software engineers are living in a future that will soon arrive for all of us. Here's how the world has changed in just the past few weeks:
1. With tools like Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex, my team ships features in days instead of months.
- Agents now write better code than I can. Now I spend my time thinking about what we want to build — not how we want to build it.
2. We're no longer signing software contracts that run longer than a year. If it were possible, I'd insist on six months.
- We believe that before long, we'll be able to build that tool at near-zero cost.
- This shows why software stocks have taken a brutal hit in recent weeks.
3. The bottleneck is no longer writing code. It's how fast humans can absorb change. We might end up creating things faster than humans can keep up.
- That could create feature fatigue ("Another update? We just had one") ... trust erosion ("Do they have a vision for all this STUFF?") ... and cognitive overload ("I just learned the old way!").
4. For CTOs navigating 2026: Your competitive advantage is no longer velocity. It's narrative coherence: You're not just shipping code, you're telling your users a story. Just in the past month, my job has changed.
Job impact ... Axios CEO Jim VandeHei: Axios wants to be transparent about how this plays out inside companies and affects total jobs. We worry others are hiding the implications, so we'll periodically use Axios as an example.
- That's why we shared the figures above from Dan — a 30% reduction in our product and tech team last year, given AI's coming capabilities. We started preparing for this almost two years ago, when that team was 90 people.
- If you look through a two-year lens, we've cut our PDT team in half, but easily more than doubled output.
So when you hear warnings that AI will result in job losses in specific areas, that's why.
- Every company and every worker should be thinking through the implications. It's not all bad news: We're using these technologies to help reduce back-end costs in local news, so we can hire lots more journalists. More on that in a future story.
Dan Cox has been Axios' chief technology officer since April 2025. He has 20+ years of experience leading engineering at Meta, Yahoo and Amazon.
- 📱 Tell us about your experience: [email protected].
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