Ethan Mollick: AI agents just made expert Stata coding skills largely obsolete
emollick · x · 2026-10-19
Ethan Mollick points to a new study (Galiani et al. 2026) as evidence that the Stata coding skill once central to his academic career is becoming obsolete.
Key findings from the chart (40 statistical programming tasks):
- A "constrained agent" setup hit roughly 97% task success, versus 76-83% for plain chatbots.
- Stata showed the biggest gap: only 61% success in chatbot mode, but agents closed the gap with Python and R almost entirely.
- Takeaway: models now act as self-repairing agents in constrained environments, not chatbots — a major shift within a year that academics should not ignore.
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