Hiten Shah had this interesting take on X
But I don’t think this is true. AI is coming after everything – mediocre, high-quality, and everything in between. Because AI can produce high-quality work and at speed. Speed plus quality is a deadly combo. So what’s the incentive for a company to pay a premium to keep someone employed in a so-called “high-quality” job when AI can do something just as well, and faster?
In fact, it might make more sense to pay a mid-level person who knows how to orchestrate tasks between AI agents, like a floor manager in a digital factory. There are already hints pointing in this direction. Take this post by Gokul Rajaram (a prolific investor and tech leader in the Valley) as a sign of things to come.
Unless the definition of “high-quality work” is agency, decision-making, speed, and judgment, then that’s a different story. That stays. That’s always been at the core of human enterprise.
But even that assumes those high-quality jobs are needed in the first place. What if a so-called “mediocre” engineer can help a neighborhood business build and operate custom services on their own? Why buy expensive enterprise software at all? If AI can help every business run, manage, and operate their own cloud infrastructure, what’s the case for paying a premium to AWS? That logic extends far beyond just cloud computing.
Either way, we’re staring down a mass-flattening event. Dinosaurs watching the asteroid blaze across the sky. Most white-collar jobs, in its current capacity, will be replaced by AI. And with that, we’ll see cascading effects on SaaS, enterprise software, and a bunch of adjacent industries.
But it’s not all bleak.
Amidst this mass extinction, there’s a Cambrian explosion stirring, a parallel revolution quietly kicking off. Advancements in LLMs have enabled a wave of new, creative, and sometimes weird experiments. It’s flavor might be more of the entertainment variety, a “Tiktokified” version of apps and software. Ghibli anyone?
Very recently Pieter Levels inspired over 1,000 people to build indie games. A whole micro-gaming ecosystem is taking shape. Something like this would’ve been unthinkable when platforms like Steam were dominated by big studios. And this is a grassroots movement, building with opensource tech (three.js), sharing work over X, collecting feedback. Its really fun to watch and we know how the future might look like in the post-AI world.
And many more such opportunities will emerge in the coming months.
So in short: yes, a mass-flattening event is coming. Jobs, as we know them, will disappear. But they will morph into something else. The sooner we find those alternatives, the better.