“No tax hike,” wrote one commenter on a local Facebook post urging residents to contact board members before the vote. “I’m on a fixed income,” wrote another. A third put it simply: “We pay enough damn taxes.”

Armstrong is not alone. School districts across the country are contending with a budget crunch as federal COVID-19 relief funds — known as ESSER — have dried up, leaving districts that expanded programs and staff during the pandemic now scrambling to cover costs on their own.

While fixed costs continue to rise, overall federal funding is projected to decrease by as much as 22 percent between the 2024–25 and 2025–26 school years, driven largely by a $24 billion loss for school districts nationwide stemming from ESSER’s expiration, according to a McKinsey analysis.

Board members at the meeting were divided on what to do about it in their district.

Board President Ashley McIntyre noted the proposed tax increase would generate roughly $1 million — about 25% of the deficit. “A tax increase much like last year does not fix our financial outlook for the next year or the following year,” she said.

Board member Tiffany Swartz read a prepared statement into the record saying she could not support the increase. “The reality is we are still facing a deficit even after the increase,” she said. Swartz called for the district to examine administrative redundancies, expand its cyber program, and explore a four-day school week and before-and-after school programming as longer-term solutions. The four-day school week idea is gaining traction nationally — more than 2,100 schools across 26 states have adopted shortened weeks, largely as a cost-saving measure.

Director Todd Luke argued that maintaining programs and facilities requires funding. “If we want to attract the best teachers to our district, educate children of the future, we have to pay the bill,” he said. He warned that without action, the fund balance could be depleted by 2030.

The skepticism in the Facebook comments tracked closely with concerns raised inside the meeting room. Residents on fixed incomes pushed back hard against any increase, a sentiment echoing across communities nationwide as inflation continues to squeeze household budgets. One resident online asked why a county “that has nothing is paying the highest wages for their district and some of the lowest test scores.”

Administrative spending has become a flashpoint in budget fights at districts around the country, as taxpayers and board members alike question whether existing staff can absorb more responsibility before new positions are filled. Armstrong is no exception.

On one popular Facebook thread, a resident asked why the district was looking to add administrators despite declining enrollment. Board member Jorn Jensen, who said his phone had been ringing all day with constituent calls, weighed in.

“Admin believes they can reverse the trend with these jobs,” he wrote. “I say, get to work on the main core problems in this district with the existing people you have on the payroll.”

Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, told K-12 Dive that when cuts do come, support staff like counselors, social workers, and reading coaches are often among the first to go.

The board did not take a final vote on the tax increase. By the end of the meeting, McIntyre summarized the tentative consensus: there is some willingness to consider a tax increase, but only if administration returns with a serious plan to cut costs first.

“There’s a stomach for increased taxes so long as we go back to the drawing board,” she said.

You can watch the full meeting recording on the Armstrong School District website here.

Editor's note: A reader noted that individual board member positions on the tax increase were not included in this article. The consensus check was conducted twice due to the complexity of the discussion, with several members adding nuance to their positions mid-vote. For a full picture of where each member stands, I encourage readers to watch the meeting recording linked above.

I WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU —

Armstrong County is at the center of some big conversations right now. Share your thoughts on:

• The Armstrong School District tax debate

• The Cadogan mine site and its regulatory history

• Proposed housing development on Cadogan land

• Data mining centers coming to the region

Drop a comment, email me at cereeseblose@gmail.com or message me directly here or on Signal: cereeseblose.57

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After her first marriage in 1987, and the divorce that followed, she discovered a loop that few women talked about: county courthouses, birth certificates, marriage records, divorce decrees that were never in the right format for the next gatekeeper. The documents she needed were scattered across jurisdictions in western Pennsylvania. None of them talked to each other.

At the time, Garvey was working part-time and raising a young son. The $200 to $400 she estimates spending on fees and travel was, in her words, “never affordable.” That doesn’t count mileage, parking, or the vacation days she burned sitting in government offices waiting for the clerk she needed to come back from lunch.

What should have been hour-long tasks instead stretched into full days. Between navigating raised seals and updated formatting requirements and chasing down certified copies, she found herself trapped in a bureaucratic loop. Each document seemed to require another office, another county, another trip. Garvey called it a process that’s “slow, extensive, and painstaking.”

Now at retirement age and navigating mobility challenges, Garvey is facing the process again to get a Real ID. “It’s an unnecessary burden on us as opposed to males,” she said. “I have to prove who I am over and over again.”

Lori Wagner, also from Pennsylvania, has changed her name three times following marriages and divorces in 1992, 2006, and 2024. She estimates spending roughly 25 hours per name change updating her passport, driver’s license, Social Security records, and financial accounts.

The legal name change itself was straightforward, she said. Everything after wasn’t. “Calling all of your accounts and formally changing name on all of them—it is crazy,” Wagner said. “I can’t imagine how someone without internet access could complete most of it.” After her most recent divorce, attorney fees to return to her maiden name were “more expensive than I expected.”

Nearly 8 in 10 married women take their husband’s last name, according to Pew Research. But no federal agency tracks what it costs them to prove that name change years later—or what it costs to change it back. The only numbers come from women themselves.

Most coverage treats name changes as a wedding checklist item. Almost no one covers what happens after a divorce, when women try to undo that change and run into a system that no longer recognizes the identity they’ve held for decades.

Connecticut family law attorney Renee Bauer, founder of Happy Even After Family Law, says that after a divorce, restoring and updating a name becomes a fragmented process where “nothing talks to each other. Each of these steps is individual.” Updating a name requires navigating Social Security, the DMV, passports, bank accounts and, in the modern era, social media verifications — each with different forms, proofs, phone numbers, and processes.

“The biggest cost is really just your sanity of having to go through all of those hoops.”

In Connecticut, courts restore a maiden name for free as part of a divorce decree. But that’s where the system’s support stops. The court order doesn’t update anything beyond the courtroom.

Someone can leave divorced, with their name legally restored, and still have their married name attached to their Social Security record, their driver’s license, their bank accounts, and their passport. The burden of aligning those records falls entirely on the individual.

Some of Bauer’s clients delay the process for months or years. Others give up entirely.

The consequences aren’t just administrative. They compound over time, especially for older women or those with limited mobility. A system that requires in-person visits across counties and states gets harder to navigate with age, even as identification requirements grow stricter.

Despite the scale of the issue, there is little data capturing it. The federal government processes millions of identification documents each year but doesn’t publish how many name changes it handles annually, or how many are tied to marriage or divorce. There is no national estimate of what women spend, financially or otherwise, to change their names back.

Part of the problem is that each agency operates in isolation. Since name changes are handled at the state level, federal agencies like Social Security and the State Department only react to changes already processed by state courts. There exists no federal mandate to collect, share or study the data. A 2025 Government Accountability Office report found that even federal employees can’t change their names across government systems with a single request. The system assumes a one-way transition from maiden to married, and no political constituency exists to push for tracking what happens when women reverse that choice.

For Bauer, the ideal solution would be for the government to create “one hub where you put all your information in, and it automatically aligns everything with all of the departments.”

Until then, the burden remains on individuals navigating a system that makes it easy for a woman to take a man’s name, but not to take her own back.

MESSAGE ME — Have you navigated a name change after a divorce, marriage, or gender transition? Did the process cost you more than you expected in time, money, or both? Are you facing Real ID or SAVE Act requirements that make proving your identity harder? Did an agency lose your records, reject your documents, or send you in circles? I want to hear from you. Email me at cereeseblose@gmail.com or message me on Signal: cereeseblose.57

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To understand how Lipella went from “strong” to broke in just nine months, you have to look at the “burn.” In the biotech world, “burn” is the cash a company spends every month just to keep the lights on and the research moving. For Lipella, that was about $465,000 a month.

That money was being invested in development of a specialized mouthwash designed to treat a painful, chronic condition called oral lichen planus.

Last spring, CEO Jonathan Kaufman was optimistic, raising millions from investors. But by November, the company admitted there was “substantial doubt” they could even stay in business, according to SEC filings.

The November 14, 2025 quarterly report included an explicit warning to investors under a section titled “Going Concern.”

“These factors individually and collectively raise substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern,” the filing stated. “The accompanying unaudited condensed financial statements do not include any adjustments that may result from this uncertainty.”

The report detailed Lipella’s accumulated deficit of $19.2 million since the company’s founding in 2005.

The filing warned that if Lipella couldn’t raise more money, “the Company may be forced to curtail or cease operations or file for bankruptcy protection or pursue a dissolution of and liquidation of all of the Company’s remaining assets.”

Kaufman and CFO Doug Johnston signed the report certifying its accuracy.

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By the time they filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this Monday, they had to ask a judge’s emergency permission just to pay their six remaining employees about $56,000 in back wages and benefits.

Left at the table is a small team: directors of operations and clinical trials, a controller, and a part-time associate.

CEO Jonathan Kaufman is currently working for no salary, and the CFO has agreed to defer his pay starting April 1. The pair staying on essentially to help sell off the company’s patents and data from their recent clinical trials.

The company’s critical research is now in limbo. Lipella’s drug, LP-310, actually finished a Phase 2a trial last fall. It showed the rinse was safe for patients who suffer from oral lichen planus, which can cause painful burning sensations, bleeding during tooth brushing, and discomfort when speaking, chewing, or swallowing. The condition has no FDA-approved treatment.

Lipella held two issued patents in the United States covering the LP-310 formulation, valid until July 11, 2035. The company also held patents in Australia, Canada, and Europe. The bankruptcy filing states Lipella intends to sell these assets through a Section 363 sale process to “maximize value for creditors.” Whether this treatment ever reaches a pharmacy shelf depends entirely on who buys those assets in the coming months.

For the folks who put their money into a “Made in Pittsburgh” success story, the outlook is grim. In these kinds of bankruptcy cases, investors often see less than ten cents on the dollar.

The company's next major deadline is April 13, when it must file complete financial schedules with the bankruptcy court showing all creditors and debts. A reorganization plan is due by July 28.

For now, research appears to have ceased, and the future of a potential Pittsburgh-born treatment is unknown.

We’ll keep an eye on those court filings as the sale moves forward.

MESSAGE ME — Are you seeing something broken in how platforms operate? Work at a company with misleading practices? Have internal docs that contradict public messaging? I want to hear from you. Email me at cereeseblose@gmail.com or message me on Signal: cereeseblose.57

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Those promises helped the platform become one of the nation’s top professional job networks — gaining nearly a billion users in just two decades.

But when the platform began selling itself as an indispensable job board, LinkedIn faced a structural conflict in its business model: how to keep its “Talent Solutions“ revenue climbing in periods where the white-collar hiring market is cooling.

Posted “3 hours ago” suggests urgency. It implies a live search, an active hiring manager, a real opportunity still within reach.

But that signal doesn’t always mean what it appears to.

Across major job platforms, including LinkedIn, the date a listing is shown to candidates is not necessarily the date the job was first posted. Internally, two versions of the same information can exist at once: the original posting date a platform records, and the refreshed timestamp it shows to candidates.

The result is a system where older listings often appear new to candidates.

Margaret Buj, a Talent Acquisition Manager and Interview Coach, has seen the disconnect leave at least one candidate “understandably frustrated.”

Pat Whelan, Head of Careers Products at LinkedIn, told Cereese Receipts in an email that “[l]ast year, we started showing a ‘Reposted X days ago’ label on job listings so it’s clearer when a role has been re-listed. Our hiring insights also provide valuable details like a company’s typical response time, whether they’re actively reviewing candidates, and if a job is promoted. Our goal is simple: help job seekers focus on opportunities where they’re more likely to hear back.”

But platform behavior does not always align cleanly with that assurance.

On March 27, a job listing on LinkedIn displayed a recent posted “3 hours” timestamp to candidates. It also appeared when filtered under “Past 24 hours.”

On the employer’s own careers page, the same role showed a publication date from the day before.

There was no indication on LinkedIn that the listing had been refreshed or reposted. No label distinguishing original publication from renewed visibility. No context connecting the two timelines.

This isn’t a glitch. It’s how the platforms are built.

When asked directly why the “Reposted” label did not appear on the specific listing, LinkedIn responded: “The posted date on LinkedIn jobs doesn’t always match the date on the employer’s career page because we display the date when the job was ingested into our system, not when it was originally posted on the employer’s site. We take this approach to ensure consistency and reliability, as we don’t control how employer pages display information and not all employers provide a visible or standardized posting date.”

The response explains why dates might differ between platforms. It does not explain why the “Reposted X days ago” label that LinkedIn says it introduced last year did not appear on a listing that showed as “3 hours ago” on the platform but dated the prior day on the employer’s site. It sidesteps the core question: why does LinkedIn show a freshness signal that doesn’t reflect the actual posting date?

The timestamp problem didn’t appear overnight. In 2023, LinkedIn’s “Talent Solutions” business, which includes sponsored job postings, crossed $7 billion in revenue for the first time. The company achieved this growth — even in a cooling job market — not by posting more jobs, but by making the “promoted” jobs even more valuable to the employers paying for them.

According to LinkedIn’s own support documentation, employers who don’t pay for “promoted” jobs face strict limits on their postings. Once those limits are reached, the listing is “paused” and application volumes drop.

If the employer chooses to promote the post, the listing gets a new injection of visibility. It climbs back up search results. It triggers mobile notifications to candidates. It shows up in job recommendations. LinkedIn’s documentation confirms that promoted posts reach on average three times more applicants than free ones and stay active until the employer closes them.

A listing that gets promoted effectively gets a second life, but the timestamp doesn’t reset to reflect that. The “Reposted” label was supposed to fix this. When it doesn’t appear, job seekers have no way to know they’re looking at a listing that may have been cycling for weeks.

Indeed took this further.

Recruit Holdings, Indeed's parent company, maintained revenue growth even as total job postings declined through a price over volume strategy. This means the platform increased the cost per ad faster than volume fell. According to Bloomberg, average unit price growth rose to around 15% in the most recent reporting period, driven by premium advertising packages.

That same strategy coincided with shrinking organic visibility. In 2023, the platform shifted away from displaying specific posting dates in public search results. By May 2024, it cut off organic visibility for staffing agencies — requiring them to sponsor listings to appear broadly in search results.

Job boards like LinkedIn and Indeed process millions of listings. To sort through them, job seekers lean heavily on filters — among them, the option to search by “posted today” or “posted within the last 24 hours.”

The logic is straightforward: get in early, get human eyes on your resume before the crowd arrives and the algorithm buries it. Applications submitted within the first four days of a listing going live can be up to eight times more likely to result in an interview, according to research from TalentWorks. For roles that draw hundreds of submissions, recency is one of the few edges a candidate has left. So they refresh obsessively, going all-in on anything marked “posted today.”

But the house is playing with a marked deck.

ATS systems refresh listings every few weeks to keep postings from sinking in search results. The cards are the same.

“In practice, a listing can sometimes appear fresh again because it has been renewed, re-synced, edited, or redistributed via the ATS or LinkedIn posting workflow, even when the role itself is not actually new,” Buj explained.

Jon Hernandez, a teacher living in New York, leaned heavily on date filters during his job search last year. The timestamps helped him decide which postings were worth a tailored cover letter and resume.

“If I saw one that was very recently posted, then I want to jump onto that,” Hernandez said. “But if I saw that it was a couple months ago and they’re still looking — to me, that is a huge red flag.”

To Hernandez, a role that goes unfilled for months signals something is wrong — an undesirable job, a toxic workplace. So he focused his energy on anything fresh. But when he clicked through to the company’s own career page, the dates didn’t always match what the job board showed. “When I clicked on the job description, I noticed that the timeframe was much different than what the job board said.” This occurred on platforms including LinkedIn and Indeed.

Mike Podesto, CEO of Find My Profession, says the behavior candidates find confusing isn’t strategic deception — it’s industry standard.

“Most job posts are tied to ATS or job boards that automatically refresh them every few weeks so they stay near the top of search results,” Podesto said. “If they don’t, the posting basically disappears and applications drop off.”

He’s also seen employers keep roles active mid-process rather than risk restarting a search if a finalist falls through. “From the employer side, it’s usually less about reposting the job and more about keeping the pipeline alive until they’re confident they’ve got the right person.”

Podesto confirmed that employers are aware candidates filter by recency, even if indirectly. “When a job is newly posted or refreshed, applications spike. When it ages, it drops off significantly.” When asked whether employers would prefer a label like “actively hiring” over “posted today,” he said many probably would. The current system, he noted, creates “a bit of a mismatch between what candidates assume and what’s actually happening behind the scenes.”

LinkedIn and Indeed control roughly 55% of the U.S. job posting market, according to data from competitive intelligence platform 6Sense. Both maintain internal records of when jobs first went live. Both could show candidates that information. They don’t.

Although Indeed stopped displaying posting dates in mid-2023, the platform’s developer documentation confirms it tracks two internal date fields: one for the original publication, one that resets with each repost. Candidates see neither. Indeed did not respond to a request for comment.

When timestamps generate more applications, platforms report stronger engagement to employers paying for premium visibility. That’s the business model. What’s missing is transparency. Neither platform’s help center clearly explains to job seekers how automatic renewals, ATS-driven re-indexing, or a listing can look brand new weeks into a search.

The Federal Trade Commission has moved against platforms that manipulate user behavior through misleading cues and manufactured urgency. Job board timestamps have largely escaped that scrutiny.

Buj put it plainly: “I would be cautious about treating ‘posted today’ as proof that a job is newly opened or that candidates are getting in at the start of the process.”

A fix isn’t technically complicated. Display the original posting date alongside the renewal date or adopt a label like Podesto’s suggested “actively hiring” — a distinction that would cost the platforms little and clarify a lot.

Neither platform has indicated plans to make that shift. In the meantime, job seekers like Jon Hernandez will keep betting on a signal that doesn’t always mean what it says. He still jumps on “Posted today” listings. Only now, he checks the company’s career page first.

MESSAGE ME — Are you seeing something broken in how platforms operate? Work at a company with misleading practices? Have internal docs that contradict public messaging? I want to hear from you. Email me at cereeseblose@gmail.com or message me on Signal: cereeseblose.57

Cereese Receipts is an independent publication. I believe understanding economy, business and tech should be accessible to everyone.

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Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, the world’s largest investor, started using a powerful AI tool by Anthropic last fall to scan public records, lawsuits and environmental violations for ESG risks in the ~ 7,000 companies it invests in.

For the Shell Polymers Monaca plant, which has operated for nearly three years without a permanent permit and faces a massive $134 million lawsuit, this innovative tool could increase global scrutiny on local violations.

Shell’s Promise to Beaver County

When Shell announced it was building a $6 billion plastics plant in Beaver County, officials said it would transform the region. The industry group for chemical companies estimated that plants like Shell’s support more than 17,000 jobs once you count everyone from factory workers to the truck drivers and suppliers they depend on, according to The American Chemistry Council.

But nearly three years after opening, Marketplace reports Shell directly employs just 500 full-time workers and about 400 contractors at the site. Local incomes in Beaver County have fallen since the plant opened, and more residents are relying on food assistance, according to the Ohio River Valley Institute.

The plant’s legal and environmental record forms a pattern that could flag the attention of the world’s biggest investor — and that could put even those 900 jobs at risk.

The Record

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has issued 43 notices of violation to Shell Polymers Monaca for noncompliance with clean water and air laws, according to data compiled by FracTracker Alliance as of July 2025. By February 2026, DEP’s own records put that total at 59 notices — mostly for air quality infractions, according to a March 2026 report by the Breathe Project.

In May 2023, Shell agreed to pay nearly $10 million in combined fines and community investments after acknowledging it had repeatedly exceeded emissions limitations since October 2022 . It paid a civil penalty of over $4.9 million to DEP and agreed to pay an additional $5 million for projects to “benefit the environment, health and quality of life of the community near the facility,” according to the agreement.

The fine did not stop the violations.

The Pennsylvania Capital-Star reported that Shell Polymers Monaca has continued to emit harmful nitrogen oxide above legally permitted levels for almost three years. DEP did not take clear enforcement action until this February, when it issued a formal Notice of Violation confirming that Shell’s 12-month rolling NOx emission exceeded its permit limit.

Reporting in the Pennsylvania Capital-Star points out that the facility has extended its original temporary operating permit seven times and still does not have a long-term Title V permit.

The New Stakes

Norway’s $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund confirmed to CNBC that its ESG risk monitoring team began using Anthropic’s Claude AI model in November 2024.

An spokesperson for the fund told the network this tool has since become “an important tool in our monitoring of ESG risk across the portfolio.”

The fund is a Shell shareholder, and it previously asked the company to directly to provide more detail on its mid-term climate strategy, according to reporting by ESG Today.

Whether the AI tool has specifically surfaced Shell’s Monaca violations is not publicly confirmed — but the system is designed to do exactly that. Norway’s fund said in its 2025 responsible investment report that these new tools scan “a wide range of public information that goes beyond what data vendors typically cover,” and where risks emerge, “the LLM conducts deeper searches, providing contextual summaries,”

Why That Matters

Shell is named in an ongoing federal lawsuit filed in May 2023 by the Environmental Integrity Project and Clean Air Council. For its NOx violations between May 2023 and December 2025, Shell is facing penalties are around $134 million .

The groups calculated potential liability of up to $117k per day for each Clean Air Act violation and $25k per day for each violation of Pennsylvania’s Air Pollution Control Act, according to court filings reported by PublicSource.

These potential liabilities are the kinds of patterns an AI compliance tool is built to flag. That’s important because when the world’s biggest investor signals a company carries environmental legal risk, smaller funds tend to follow.

If global investors start treating the Monaca facility as a legal liability rather than a productive asset, Shell will have to decide whether keeping it open is worth the mounting cost.

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Shell’s Position

Shell has previously said it is “working with the relevant regulatory agencies throughout the process and we remain committed to protecting people, the environment, and to being a responsible neighbor in the communities where we live and work,” according to PublicSource.

What to Watch

Four signals that will determine what happens next:

The Title V permit decision. If DEP finally grants or denies a permanent operating permit, that’s the fulcrum. A denial could hand the citizen lawsuit immediate leverage.

The $134 million lawsuit. The Clean Air Council and Environmental Integrity Project’s federal case is ongoing. Watch for new filings, settlement talks or court dates.

NBIM’s next responsible investment report. The fund publishes annual ESG disclosures. Monitor if Shell’s compliance record surfaces there.

DEP actions. The plant has been emitting above NOx permit limits for nearly three years with no new fine, the Capital-Star reported. How is the DEP responding?

To go deeper on this story, I need to hear from you.

I’m looking for:

• Beaver County residents near the Monaca facility

• Anyone who has engaged with DEP or Shell on air quality

• Environmental attorneys or advocates working the citizen suit

• Anyone inside institutional ESG screening who wants to talk

Reply directly here or on Signal: cereeseblose.57

I also welcome you to reach out with any questions, concerns, or topics you want me to cover.

This is an independent publication. I believe understanding economy, business and tech should be accessible to everyone. Your support in any form helps me keep my writing free. The best way to support is by liking, commenting, and sharing… or buying me a coffee once my “Buy Me A Coffee” account is live.

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Unlike GitHub Copilot and Cursor, Anthropic’s voice transcription tokens are free. Early users report that the experience is genuinely fluid: spoken instructions translate cleanly into code changes, and iterating conversationally feels faster than typing prompts. Anthropic was reached for comment regarding the long-term pricing of voice tokens, but the company did not respond by the time of publication.

Voice mode is being promoted as a way to further reduce friction between human intent and AI execution. It’s the pinnacle of “

vibe coding,” a term coined by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy to describe a shift from writing code line-by-line to high-level description. Enthusiasts praise it for speed and fluidity. But beneath the excitement, a more complicated picture is taking shape.

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Security gaps are a common issue emerging in projects created by “vibe coding” that appear polished.

A major debate around this first hit developer circles after veteran developer Joel Reymont used Claude Code to generate 13,000 lines of code for the OCaml compiler in just a few days. He saw it as a massive leap in productivity. However, the OCaml maintainers rejected the contribution, arguing that the sheer volume of AI-generated code created an impossible and exhausting review burden.

It’s an extreme example of a more pervasive problem that developers are encountering, where the speed and amount of AI code is not yet at a point where it can stand without the manual work of humans. Engineers argue that the process of checking AI code can be even more costly and time-consuming than simply writing the code by hand. One developer I spoke to who is familiar with AI coding tools said the technology is improving rapidly but still requires experienced engineers to guide it.

While the ability for AI generated code to run has jumped from 20% to over 90% in just two years, it isn’t necessarily safe. A Veracode analysis revealed that 45% of AI-generated snippets contain security vulnerabilities, a rate that matches human error but at a volume humans can’t possibly audit. The risk is less about the frequency of bugs and more about the time cost of debugging complex, AI-written code that often lacks proper architecture.

Those gaps have had real-world consequences. In early 2025, the founder of a data-enrichment startup called Enrichlead boasted on X (formerly Twitter) that the platform had been built with “zero hand-written code” using the AI coding tool Cursor. Within days, users discovered major security flaws, including the ability to bypass paid features and manipulate data. The vulnerabilities quickly drew criticism across developer and security communities, and the project was ultimately abandoned after the founder acknowledged he lacked the expertise to audit and secure the roughly 15,000 lines of AI-generated code.

Reviewing that much code is a massive undertaking, yet managers and project leads increasingly expect it from senior developers.

One detailed account on r/ClaudeCode described the day-to-day experience as “babysitting a system that actively resists completing work,” with the cognitive burden of constantly verifying AI output is more exhausting than writing the code manually.

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Others worry about what this means for the engineers coming up behind them. “Asking it to do something you don’t know how to do, that’s just asking for a disaster,” one developer warned on r/ClaudeAI.

The shift is already underway. A LeadDev survey found that 54% of engineering leaders plan to hire fewer junior developers. AI will now be handling the entry-level tasks that once trained senior talent, leaving a gap in the workforce of experts capable of catching subtle hallucinations and logic errors.

Critics fear that this reliance on AI coding could create a dangerous precedent where founders choose immediate speed over long-term stability. Founders may be left with platforms that are un-auditable and un-scalable.

The engineers most bullish on AI coding tools tend to be the ones who are also clearest about their limits. Simon Willison, a prominent developer and blogger who has written extensively about LLM capabilities, has described the current moment as an inflection point.

What the responsible hybrid looks like, based on the emerging consensus in developer communities: AI for acceleration on well-understood, bounded problems; human review before anything enters a shared codebase, and ongoing investment in junior developer mentorship.

The OCaml episode, in the end, may be the most instructive data point. Joel Reymont wasn’t wrong that the problem was worth solving. What the maintainers pushed back on was the assumption that working was enough and that the community would be able to absorb those 13,000 lines of AI-generated code and stand behind it indefinitely.

Voice mode may make it faster to get to work, but it doesn’t change what comes after.

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Prediction market operator Kalshi is facing significant user backlash and threats of a class-action lawsuit following the settlement of a high-volume market tied to the status of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei.

At the center of the dispute is whether death constitutes “leaving a job” under the terms of the wager.

Kalshi says it does not. Traders argue that interpretation was not prominently disclosed.

The dispute is raising questions about transparency and governance at the federally regulated exchange.

Market Dynamics and User Expectations

The “event contract,” titled “Ali Khamenei out as Supreme Leader?” allowed users to bet on whether Khamenei would leave his position by a specified date. Because Iran’s Supreme Leader holds a lifetime appointment, many traders considered death the primary or only realistic mechanism for him to leave office.

When rumors of Khamenei’s death circulated, Kalshi suspended trading. Instead of a full win for "Yes,” the exchange settled positions at the "last-traded fair price" before news of his death.

For traders holding “Yes” shares, that price was only a few cents on the dollar — a fraction of the $1 payout they had anticipated.

Rival prediction platform Polymarket, which is not federally regulated in the U.S., kept its corresponding market open. As news was confirmed, “Yes” shares climbed, and a full payout was delivered to holders. Traders who held "Yes" positions received their full expected payouts.

Traders critical of Kalshi argue that by freezing the market early, the company interfered with price discovery. That’s the process by which markets incorporate new information into asset prices. Some allege the move shielded “No” bettors from losses at the expense of “Yes” bettors.

Traders on the Kalshi platform immediately began reacting to the situation in the exchange’s “prediction” post forum.

The “Death Carveout”

Kalshi maintains it followed its published rulebook. It says contracts include a “death carveout” provision stating that if a subject dies, the market resolves at the “last-traded fair price” rather than a “Yes” or “No” win.

As a U.S.-regulated exchange, Kalshi is overseen by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which widely prohibits contracts that allow people to profit directly from a death.

Kalshi asserts its rules always specified that in the event of death, the market would resolve to the last traded price, not a full payout, to comply with these rules.

Users counter that the clause was not prominently communicated and that the market’s framing as a political status event implied death would qualify as being “out” of office. On the subreddit r/Kalshi, some users are now accusing the company of a “massive scam,” threatening a class-action lawsuit, and promising to delete the app over a lack of transparency.

Kalshi’s Resolution Plan

In an email to users, Kalshi acknowledged that there was “grammatical ambiguity” in the contract language and said it would improve how key rules are surfaced in the user interface.

The following is outlined in the exchange’s resolution plan:

• All transaction fees will be refunded

• Positions acquired before Khamenei’s death will be paid based on the last-traded price prior to his passing

• Positions acquired after his death will be reimbursed up to the original cost of entry

• Realized gains and losses will not be affected

  

Political Optics and Broader Implications

The dispute lands at a time when prediction markets are facing growing scrutiny in the U.S.

Kalshi’s board includes Donald Trump Jr., a high-profile political figure whose connection to the dispute has amplified online backlash. While there is no indication he was involved in the market’s design or settlement, his affiliation has fueled perceptions among some online traders that politically sensitive event contracts risk becoming flashpoints in America’s broader culture wars over gambling, regulation and the monetization of real-world events.

The incident could prompt regulators to scrutinize how such contingency clauses are presented to traders. It also could test public trust in exchanges as event contracts expand into politics and geopolitics.

All in all, the controversy has exposed the friction between innovative market design and compliance boundaries for companies regulated by U.S. law.

Disclaimer: This information is for educational purposes and does not constitute legal or financial advice.