The March CPI report just landed, and headline inflation jumped to 3.3% year-over-year, the highest since May 2024. The culprit is energy. Gasoline prices surged roughly 15% in a single month thanks to the Iran conflict disrupting global oil supply through the Strait of Hormuz.

Also today: the one-year anniversary of Liberation Day tariffs (the results are mixed at best), why AI is creating two completely different job markets split by experience level, and a free tool to check how tariffs are hitting your specific industry.

Let's get into it.

Weekly jobless claims rose to 219,000, above the 210K estimate and up from last week's 203K. Still historically low, but the uptick breaks a streak of declining readings. Continuing claims fell to 1.794 million, suggesting people who lose jobs are still finding new ones relatively quickly.

Liberation Day turned one year old this week, and the scorecard is rough. Manufacturing shed 100,000 jobs since January 2025. The trade deficit hit an all-time high before partially recovering. Tariffs changed more than 50 times since April 2025, and the Supreme Court struck down most of them in February.

IBM is tripling its entry-level hiring in 2026, betting that companies slashing junior roles now will be scrambling for mid-level talent in three to five years. Their CHRO called it the "most important workforce decision" companies will make this decade.

Upwork's 2026 skills report shows demand for AI-related freelance skills jumped 109% year-over-year. AI video generation grew 329%, AI integration 178%. Freelancers with AI skills earn roughly 40% more per hour than those without.

Block laid off 4,000 workers citing AI, but Bloomberg reported growing skepticism. An Oxford Economics study found many "AI layoffs" are actually corrections from past overhiring. Current and former Block employees say 95% of AI-generated code still needs human modification

Mintlify analyzed 790 million requests across its documentation platform. The finding: AI coding agents account for 45.3% of all traffic, nearly tied with traditional browsers at 45.8%.

Two tools are driving almost all of it:

The rest of the field, OpenCode, Trae, ChatGPT, and NotebookLM, is showing up but nowhere close.

One caveat: OpenAI's Codex doesn't send an identifiable user-agent header, so the real agent percentage is likely even higher.

The takeaway for anyone maintaining developer docs: your documentation now serves two audiences. Structure and machine-readability matter as much as clarity for human readers.

Try Mintlify today!

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the March Consumer Price Index this morning, and headline inflation rose 0.9% month-over-month and 3.3% year-over-year. That's up sharply from February's 2.4% annual rate and marks the highest reading since May 2024.

The driver is energy. Gasoline prices surged roughly 15% in March after the Iran conflict disrupted oil transit through the Strait of Hormuz, producing the largest single-month jump in fuel costs since at least 1957. That alone accounts for the bulk of the headline move.

Core CPI, which strips out food and energy, came in at 0.3% monthly and 2.7% annually. That's the number the Fed is actually watching. If core stays contained, the oil shock gets treated as a temporary disruption rather than a structural inflation problem.

Futures markets had already priced out an April rate cut. The real question now is whether the September window is still alive. A core CPI number that holds at 2.7% keeps that possibility open. If it starts drifting up in April's data, rate cuts slide into 2027.

Tariffs are compounding the picture. The Yale Budget Lab estimates tariffs will add $1,500 to the average household's costs in 2026, on top of the energy spike. The Fed is stuck between an oil shock it can't control and tariff-driven price pressure that isn't going away.

Why it matters: This report moves mortgage rates, hiring budgets, and how aggressive companies feel about expansion. If you're negotiating comp, refinancing debt, or waiting to make a big purchase, the timeline just shifted. Watch core CPI in next month's report to see whether this is a one-time energy shock or something stickier.

A Dallas Fed study published in February found that AI is simultaneously helping experienced workers and replacing junior ones, and the wage data makes the split unmistakable.

In the top 10% of AI-exposed industries, wages have grown 8.5% since late 2022. In computer systems design specifically, wages are up 16.7%. But employment in those same sectors has declined roughly 1% while the broader economy added jobs at more than twice that rate.

The pattern: companies are cutting headcount and paying the survivors more. And the cuts are concentrated at the bottom. Workers aged 22 to 25 in AI-exposed occupations have seen a 13% drop in employment since ChatGPT launched. The decline isn't from mass layoffs. It's from companies simply not hiring entry-level workers in the first place.

Occupations with higher "experience premiums," where judgment and tacit knowledge matter most (lawyers, credit analysts, marketing strategists), are seeing the strongest wage growth as AI exposure increases. The less your job depends on book-learned skills, the safer you are.

IBM is betting against this trend by tripling entry-level hiring, arguing that companies cutting junior talent now will face a leadership pipeline crisis within five years. Their CHRO put it bluntly: the companies that double down on entry-level hiring in this environment will be the most successful ones in 2031.

Why it matters: If you're early in your career, the playbook has changed. Generic skills that AI can replicate are losing value fast. The move is to stack experience, judgment, and domain expertise as quickly as possible, because those are the skills the market is paying a premium for right now..

The Yale Budget Lab built a real-time tariff tracker that breaks down the economic impact of current U.S. tariffs by sector, product category, and consumer cost. It's updated regularly and pulls from actual trade flow data, not projections.

Open the tracker, find your industry or the products your company sells, and look at two numbers: the effective tariff rate on your sector's inputs, and the estimated consumer price impact. If your company sells anything that crosses a border (or uses components that do), this tells you exactly how much margin pressure is coming.

Use this in your next 1:1 or strategy meeting. "I pulled the Yale data on our sector, and here's what the tariff exposure looks like" is the kind of specificity that gets noticed.

Last issue's CPI prediction: the consensus called for 3.7% YoY. It came in at 3.3%, below expectations. Core held at 2.7%. The energy shock was real but slightly less severe than feared.

Scientists discovered that DNA has a hidden "second code" where cells detect inefficient genetic instructions and selectively silence them, revealing a new layer of gene regulation that could reshape how we understand disease. (ScienceDaily)

A new nano-cage water filter removes up to 98% of "forever chemicals" (PFAS) from tap water, including the short-chain variants that current filters can't catch. It stays effective after five reuse cycles. (ScienceDaily)

Researchers found that a protein called FTL1 weakens brain cell connections as we age, and reducing it in mice reversed memory decline, opening a potential new target for treating age-related cognitive loss. (ScienceDaily)