the unpleasant truth: AI is coming for your job

well, at least the CEO of Fiverr, Shopify, and Duolingo think so

The top AI model is now smarter than 85% of humans.

By the end of 2026 it will be smarter than 99.9% of humans.

And you think you will still have a job?

The above is a post from David Patterson on X, to which Elon Musk replied with this:

"Roughly correct"

Now, let me overload your brain with more for a minute.

Last month, the CEO of Fiverr sent out an email to his team.

While I have my assumptions that Fiverr is a special case, considering most Fiverr work is past-model AI quality (shots fired), there were some interesting key points:

• Unpleasant truth: AI is coming for your job, and his job, every job

• Easy tasks no longer exist, hard tasks become the new easy, and impossible tasks become hard

• Scream into a pillow, pick yourself back up, and become future-proof (as we'll learn in this post)

On top of that, we've got the CEO of Shopify, Duolingo as a company, and more I've seen across social media publicly stating that they are adopting the AI-first mindset. There were some headlines about Duolingo replacing workers with AI already.

Scared yet?

Many people are.

And while I can't go over all of my thoughts in this letter alone, I'll share a few that should equip you with things you can do right now to better prepare yourself for what's coming.

This is one of the most exciting times to be alive.

By the end of this, I'm confident you will see that too.

Become AI First

There are 3 types of people with AI:

• People who tried ChatGPT once a few years ago and thought it wasn't that special

• People who use various AI tools for internet searches, summaries, and simple tasks that would take maybe 10 more seconds to do without AI

• People who have used it enough to "see the light" and are using it in every place that they can

I have a lot of opinions on AI.

I don't think it hurts your ability to think in the slightest.

I don't think it stunts your creativity or development.

But I want this to be a mostly practical piece.

What most people don't understand is that the output of AI is up to your skill and imagination.

If you give AI extremely specific instructions, or use an app aside from ChatGPT that does this for you, it will follow those instructions pretty damn close.

As an example, the average AI user will type "create a YouTube video for me" out of either laziness or lack of knowledge. AI will respond with a few questions, and then it will spit out a script based on some horrible YouTube advice (because there is plenty on the internet) that won't get you anywhere. Especially since anyone can do that.

On the other hand, I can give it exact instructions for:

• How to generate high performing ideas based on my interests and expertise

• How to craft the perfect introduction that hooks the viewer in

• How to structure the body, tone, style, voice, and where to insert b-roll, visuals, quotes, or anything else

• I can continue, but you get the point

Then, I can repeat that process for any style of video, social post, landing page, or really any other task… and then I have a database of prompts (AKA employees) that do work with my expertise and creativity in a few seconds rather than hours, days, or weeks.

Here's an example of me asking AI for potential title variations for a newsletter:

And here's the output when I use my title generator prompt:

The first 10 that show are meh, mainly because it's pulling from the intro rather than the broad ideas of the newsletter, so I need to refine the prompt. But still, much higher quality.

We are currently building a custom prompts and workflows feature in Kortex so you can have a workspace filled with your own processes. Right now, if you want to see the YouTube example in action, watch this. It'll blow your mind how well it can script a video.

Having it perform specific tasks like that is only one use case.

Further, when AI is used as a thinking partner, the way you think begins to change, because you are reading and learning more with every output. That impacts your decisions, and your decisions compound into the outcome of your life. Big.

---

Try to automate yourself out of work

being ai-native isn’t about building features for your users. it’s an operating model for how to run your company. it’s how you work, how you think, how you & your company breathe. it’s a re-architecture. a rewiring. a philosophical shift from “how do we scale humans?” to “how do we scale decisions, creativity, & action with machines?

– Signull

What sparked this letter was a culmination of ideas building up with a few pushing me over the edge to write this.

The first idea is that of the self-directed career from the Cosmos Institute.

Before industrialization, free individuals were mostly farmers and artisans.

The mark of a free person was that they were meant to act on their own interest and do many things throughout their life. Around 80% of free workers were self-employed vs. a mere 10% today.

Slaves, on the other hand, were the ones trained to do one specific task for the entirety of their lives.

In comes machines and we quickly find ourselves in factories and excel sheets and algorithms.

The question then is:

Will this AI revolution further remove us from autonomy and freedom to act on our interests?

It's absolutely possible that most people shift from autopilot to autocomplete. From having work assigned to them to having the work done for them.

But for those who value creative work and taking control of the choices they make, there's another option.

Normally, during technological transitions, humans adapt by developing higher-level skills and forms of knowledge. We abstract up a layer when skills inevitably become less valuable through automation.

With AI, this is happening again. We must abstract up a layer beyond most skills that have served us well for the past few decades. Specifically, we're transitioning from labor to mind.

While AI can now think and execute as well as us, we must think about how we think in relation to systems that could do the thinking for us.

As we continue, keep this question in mind:

When should I leverage AI and when should I do it myself?

That leads us to the second idea on becoming "AI first:"

In a recent post from one of my favorite anonymous thinkers, Signull gave examples of what AI first looks like in typical company roles.

Here are a few straight from his writing so I don't butcher them.

For product development:

Non-AI-first:

• Slow feedback loops

• Manual research

• Roadmap debates based on opinion

AI-first

• Summarize all user interviews in minutes

• Generate roadmap options based on feature clustering

• Simulate user behavior before launching anything

Prompts:

“summarize the last 50 user interviews and cluster the main pain points by frequency and intensity. suggest 3 product bets with highest signal-to-noise.”

“given the user feedback and usage data, write a product spec for a new onboarding flow. include edge cases and counterarguments.”

For support:

Non-AI-first:

• Human triage

• Support reps re-answering the same questions

AI-first:

• Auto-solve tier 1 issues with 24/7 LLMs

• Summarize complex threads for human escalations

• Generate help center content dynamically based on ticket volume

Prompts:

“summarize this 5-message support thread and suggest the correct resolution. highlight any customer frustration.”

“generate a help center article for this recurring question. include screenshots, edge cases, and callouts for errors.”

Now imagine this with simulating marketing or content before it even goes out, sales based on user personas, or design variations based on user confusion. This applies to one-person companies or creators as well.

The common objection is, "AI isn't there yet," but that's the entire point.

It will be.

And once it is, those who have spent time with AI will run laps around you.

And even if it won't be, learning AI is still a very good thing to do. It's clearly going to be a major part of our lives.

So how do you start now so you be ready when that point hits very soon?

My advice: practice automating yourself out of work.

When you go to do any task, do this:

• Write down the entire process in detail like you are teaching someone how to do your job (including thought processes or creative processes)

• Assume that any task or piece of that process can be done with a prompt

• Attempt to turn that task or piece of that process into a prompt

• Test it, note where it doesn't do well, and refine the prompt until it's at least 90% of the way there

• Store that prompt somewhere safe

And if you don't know how to perform a task, you can either ask AI the best way to do it, have AI break down a YouTube video from an expert teaching it, or give AI a book to do the same thing. Then, turn that into a prompt and refine.

The quality of your work is the quality of your prompt.

It's not that AI isn't as good as you. It's that you aren't good enough to make AI as good as you. Tasks thinking vs systems thinking.

It's no longer the one-person business. It's one person plus employees born from written instruction. (Or teams of individuals who can do 10 employees worth of work.)

Now, one of the most invaluable things in my life is having a prompt that creates prompts. Sounds funny, but it's incredible. I can jot down quick instructions, feed it to that prompt, and then read over and refine the output.

If you want to try this, go to Chat → Write Incredible AI Prompts in Kortex and start playing around.

Of course, becoming AI first isn't the only thing that's going to save you from the mass replacement.

Let's talk about that.

You're Probably Going To Have To Change Your Entire Life, And That's Great News

Here's the thing.

I'm not in any position to tell people whose lives I don't understand what they should do and how they should think.

I don't have kids to feed. I'm not working two jobs trying to make ends meet. I'm a 28 year old guy who owns nothing and eats out for dinner every night (I do pay my taxes though).

To those people, who I doubt are reading this, I'm sorry, but I have no idea how to help. Maybe the below can at least give you something to try.

To those who think the solution is social reform rather than continuing an accelerated version of the 9-5 rat race:

I agree. But your dream of an endless tropical vacation free of work is delusion and will not make you happy. We've discussed the necessity of meaningful work regardless of money involved many times before (like in my book). Life is oscillation. Work balances rest for a healthy psyche. Your definition and connotations of work are probably vastly different than mine.

Contribution to something greater than yourself is a major puzzle piece of happiness. That alludes to a more mature definition of work.

But for the majority reading this who have at least a few hours to spare if they put down their phones, aren't about to be evicted from their home, and generally have a comfortable life:

What's the issue?

Why are you complaining?

Even though it's overblown at this point and somehow still sparks controversy, the average 9-5 jobs fucking suck (I'm not talking about the .01% who can nap in sleep pods at google). We've collectively hated them for decades now. Evolution solves problems and now that we've solved one of the most painful, you have no room to complain.

You're presented with one of the greatest opportunities of a lifetime and you're still falling into the most clichéd trap of comfort and playing victim and trying to hold onto your old way of life when all good things aren't permanent?

You still don't realize that if you work a job a machine could automate, your life probably lacks novelty, continuous growth, challenge, and complexity? That alone is a massive signal to do something new. This isn't opinion, this is documented patterns of psychological development. Fulfill basic needs, then pursue actualization needs, and AI allows for the acceleration of both.

For those that are amply convinced, you need to start building.

1) What's left is mastery and meaning

You have a few years before you are either let go, keep your job (and are eventually let go), upskill endlessly to take on new rules in the company you work at, or have to fend for yourself.

AI isn't just coming for artists and programmers, it's coming for anyone that has a brain.

Now, I'm sure this will create a world where we don't have to worry about money. I have my doubts, because human nature and stuff.

But there will be an acclimation period where many people don't know what to do.

That leaves us with a mastery and meaning economy.

In other words, discovering and pursuing your life's work (you know, the thing you could have, and probably should have done all along).

I don't know if we will be doing this in VR or on mars, but right now, this is done on the internet.

• Choose something you deeply care about

• Study, research, and master it ruthlessly paired with an AI first mindset

• Shamelessly share what you know, what you do, and why you do it in public

Because the only real safety net in today's world is a body of work that's impossible to ignore.

Which leads to:

2) Attention is the only differentiator

As the world is filled with more AI – trust, attention, and signal become more scarce.

Yes, the dead internet is growing.

Anyone can ask AI to pump out a years worth of content with a single prompt.

But from the example before, that doesn't mean much.

That simply means that the level of market sophistication will continue to increase rapidly. People will get bored of the cookie cutter and the cookie cutter will change every month. People will lose trust in most content. And that doesn't account for the fact that you still have to know what you're doing in order to have AI create something unique and compelling.

My advice:

• Use AI to do the things you don't want to do as a one-person business.

• Don't give AI complete control over the things you deeply care about (don't have it do the work for you).

I like writing. AI can write well, and I would encourage the non-writer to use AI for that purpose if they need to write to achieve their life's work in another domain, but having AI write for me spits out something that is not from my mind.

Since I want to focus on writing, I plan to use AI for other things that are necessary to sustain that, like marketing, sales, admin, and other things. The prompts I refine over time are my little employees.

That's not inauthentic, that's authenticity at scale.

Because never has there been a time where one-person can operate at the scale of an entire company.

What does that mean?

It means you are the niche.

You are the differentiator.

Your mastery, experience, and way of looking at the world through a perception forged by every bit of information you've processed over the entirety of your life.

When AI makes 90% of products the same, nothing really changes.

People continue to buy from people and brands they know, trust, and follow.

It's less about building a sales funnel and more about building a world people can explore.

I wrote an article on How To Build A World here.

3) 1,000 true fans is increasingly relevant

Most people don't want to be famous.

And even if you do, save that goal until you're actually making a living.

That's what most people want.

And you don't need millions of followers to get anywhere close to that.

You need about 1,000 true fans.

And honestly, it's even less than that.

If you're good at what you do, you can:

• Charge $5,000 per client for a service

• Charge $10 for a paid newsletter (yes, I'm on the substack kick now)

• Charge anywhere from $50 to $150 for any type of product

• Create spin off products like a book or software (since anyone will be able to code up an app that solve a specific problem) for buyers to buy again

Most people can live just fine off of $5,000-$10,000 a month. If you can't do that with pure skill and practice… not sure what to tell you.

For a $10 subscription, 500 people that you build up to over 1-2 years, which is more than possible, is $5,000 a month (and probably double that considering 30% will pay yearly).

If you have an offer stack of something recurring, something high ticket, and various low ticket products, it really doesn't take much to make a living doing what you enjoy.

And considering how attention flows on social media, how people go on to follow new people, and other natural fluctuations that those outside of the game can't see, there is really more than enough attention to go around.

The key is that you treat it the opposite of a job.

It's work that evolves. It's work that demands continuous learning. It's work with a prerequisite that you have at least some of your life together.

The minute you stagnate is the minute entropy increases, and that's a wonderful thing.

Staying the same is the enemy of a good life.

– Dan

When you're ready, here are a few ways I can help further:

• The paid tier of this substack increases in price by 30% tomorrow if you want to lock in your rate. As mega guides, prompts, and action plans go in it will continue to go up. Here’s the last mega guide if you want to see if it’s worth $10.

• Every Saturday, I send out a high-signal summary of all my writing to 175,000+ people on my personal list. If you’d like to receive it, you can join here.

• If you want all AI models in one place, the ability to reference documents and PDFs fast, and 25+ prebuilt workflows for learning, writing, marketing, and planning – sign up for Kortex free here.