No more bio breaks
In my first job, I built an app for people to sell their old clothes to one another. Sure, it had developed into something more culturally specific, a marketplace for hype beasts to speculate on 80s vintage Patagonia and Soviet-era film cameras, but looking back on it now it was job that was a lot more rooted in the real world. People were signing up, taking pictures of their things, and letting other people buy them. Sometimes, they’d put those things in a parcel with a handwritten note, and sometimes their doorbell would ring with the buyer right there in the flesh.
In my second job, I worked in new digital media. The websites I built were thumb fodder, the sort of thing a certain type of person would read in a pop-up web view served on top of their social media feed. Listicle, quiz, top twenty. Remarkably, though, I sat in an office with the young people who made those articles. On the whole, it was a generation of funny people trying to break into the media industry sideways. Some of them succeeded and I see their bylines in the New York Times, in nationally acclaimed newsletters-cum-independent-media-outlets that they founded. Today, the idea that a company would pay humans to create this stuff is increasingly incredible.
In my third job, I built an app for people with electric cars and wanted to charge them cheaply, wanted to use their car-sized batteries to cheapen their home electricity bills. We called APIs to get the hourly price of energy that waxed and waned with the sun, wind, and mercury. We called APIs that activated the charging extensions plugged into people’s vehicles in their garages. A bug we shipped one day cycled certain car batteries so much it irrevocably broke them. Proof of our tangible effect.
In my fourth job, I built software for people who build software. Sure, you can use it to make your wedding seating plan as I did, but that wasn’t where the money came from. Our marketing materials spoke about collaboration and creativity, a virtual whiteboard that bridged the dark void of separation that was the COVID-19 work-from-home experience. After the pandemic came the end of cheap VC capital and the onset of AI, and the party ended for good. Increasingly, people don’t tell me they use that in their meetings any more. Nor did the company market their product as such. Mainly it was about how it integrated into the AI workflows they built to make themselves feel like masters of their tiny universes.
Extraordinary investment demands extraordinary returns. In early 2026, after a certain billionaire tech CEO laid off 40% of his employees and attributed the decision to a new “core thesis” of AI, the company’s stock rose nearly 25%. He won’t be the last. Whether these layoffs are based on actual AI benefits or merely “anticipatory” is neither here nor there. Employers have strong incentives to reduce headcount and increase AI spending before competitors do.
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To replace labor, AI doesn’t need to actually deliver comparable outputs. It only needs to fulfill a certain executive fantasy of “what work looks like”. That’s much easier than, say, achieving AGI (however defined).
--- Extinction-level Capitalism, Matthew Butterick
Within the walls, AI was foisted on the staff of the software company too. The AI companies’ shareholders were usually also shareholders of the software companies, and they needed their incredibly inflated valuations to pay off. How are you optimising your workflow with AI? Are you on board? If not, everybody around you is working to replace you so feel free to leave at any time. The bosses execute AI job replacement-driven layoffs.
The remaining people spend their days reading AI-generated feature specifications and AI-generated code. They ship features that supply AI-driven workflows to other software companies building features to replace humans elsewhere.
I’ve gone about a career in whatever people happened to call tech at the time with the understanding that, on the whole, people matter more than machines, more than money. It’s been possible if sometimes tense to hold those values right up until the last couple of years. The desperation and venality in the industry today leaves less and less room for humanity. It’s almost gone, and what’s left is shrinking faster all the time.