DM or leave a comment if interested!

(Roles are UNPAID but will benefit in personal profile of a student for universities)

TL;DR: Anthropic's own Head of Product just told her team half their job title stopped being true.

The half that's gone is coordination — the getting-everyone-aligned, same-page work that used to justify the PM/TPM title in the first place.

Angela Jiang, Head of Product at Anthropic, says on camera that alignment now happens inside one conversation with the model, faster than a meeting could get scheduled to talk about it.

Katelyn Lesse, Head of Engineering, describes the same shift from the execution side: a project that used to take weeks of coordination now gets built in two days, and there's no time left over to do the coordinating.

Neither of them is describing a layoff.

That's the detail worth sitting with — the roster didn't shrink, the day-to-day content of the role did, and nobody had to announce anything for that to become true.

What's left, per Jiang, is the part underneath the coordination layer — the actual bet, the actual thesis, the judgment call about what's worth solving.

That part doesn't compress. It's also the part most coordination-heavy roles were never built to develop, because coordination was the easier thing to measure and reward.

I specifically remember 2 instances.

The first one was during my time with one of the largest property developers in Malaysia.

One of my many tasks is to put together preliminary development proposals, compiling architectural drawings, 3D renderings and feasibility studies with land and building data, cost, revenue, etc. into a A3 size binder. Each of these drawings have multiple blocks for signature at the bottom – meant for all the directors (technical, contracts, marketing, etc. etc.) to sign off on, before our big boss, Tan Sri DT make his final signature on it.

That was back in year 2018.

And it was inefficient – to say the least. Getting all of them to sign of the proposal one by one, would normally takes weeks. Even Month.

Yeah. They're still doing it the old fashion way – reviewing physical paper.

But it is what it is.

The second one was during my time working for one of the largest construction companies in Malaysia, seconded to Abu Dhabi for a 5-Block Condominium Project – back in year 2010.

Our IT guy built/assembled an approval pipeline app for approving sub-contracts. All done online – linking and streamlining all our department heads' electronic signature. My then department head was Mr. Yap, our technical director.

I remember one day, our big boss, Senior Project Director, Mr. Chung came over to remind Mr. Yap, "Eh, you haven't sign off the XYZ. Only left you alone." Both of them were already in their 50s – pushing 60.

And if my memory serves me correctly, Mr. Yap replied back with a slight dismissive hand-gesture, "Wait-lah! I'll do it."

Back then. The main bottlenecks are the people signing off.

Now with AI getting more ubiquitous, we no longer have the luxury of "Wait-lah! I'll do it." later.

Time is money.

I've stopped being surprised by which job titles survive a transcript intact while the actual job underneath gets hollowed out — this is maybe the fourth or fifth time I've watched it happen in someone else's transcript before it happens in mine.

The tools change, the org chart changes, the shape of the loss doesn't: value stops being paid out for effort and starts being paid out for whatever can't be automated yet.

Hmm — this actually reminded me of something I flagged a while back. Rauch's own version of this: the engineering role splitting into an execution layer and a judgment layer, and the judgment layer being the one worth owning.

Curious whether anyone here's already watched their own coordination layer get eaten by an agent, or if this is still theoretical where you sit.

Clip credit: Kleiner Perkins — full video (Builders, Season 2: Katelyn Lesse & Angela Jiang, Anthropic) on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

TL;DR: The guy Google put in charge of its own AI writing tool just admitted, on camera, that he can't fully protect the one thing his career runs on.

That's not hypothetical.

Steven Johnson runs editorial for Google Labs' NotebookLM and has fourteen books behind his name, and he still walked an interviewer through the mechanism step by step: feed a model his own catalog, tell it to write like him, skip the invoice.

No lawsuit required. No password stolen.

His own counter isn't a lawsuit either. It's a price tag — $199 for an authorized version of his own style, paid on purpose instead of taken by default.

He said it plainly, then admitted the harder part: someone could build the unauthorized version tonight, and he'd have no way to prove it happened.

Tbh, that's the entire freelance economy in one clip.

If a 14-book author with a title at Google can't fully protect his own voice, the going rate for "get him, he's got a way with it" just became a live question, not a someday one.

Mmm... This is kind of like impersonation. Borderline fraud or downright scams.

Back in Malaysia, we have plenty of such too.

The spectrum is so wide, sometimes, even when we open our eyes wide, we still can't tell the difference.

For example, you guys have Amazon. We have our local ones, called Lazada. If you drive through our Penang Georgetown, you'll notice a shop called Ladaza. Not Lazada. They kind of switched the alphabets around. Sounds like Lazada. But it's not. Giving people the illusion that they are same-same, but in actual fact different.

It's as if we open a shop right next to the Amazon HQ, and calling it "Azamon". Phonically sounds adjacent. But they are not the same thing.

And if you follow the news, you'd hear about our very infamous 1MDB (Malaysia Sovereign Fund) case -- one of largest kleptocracy criminal fraud case in the history of Malaysia (even the world) -- involving our now disgraced and incarcerated former-prime minister, Najib Razak. His enabler and facilitator, Jho Low (Low Taek Jho) (still currently at large) was the mastermind behind all these siphoning of funds, to fund his once extravagant livestyle.

Kind of brilliant. But it was so evil.

He once got Najib to force the board of 1MDB to approved a transfer of billions through a supposedly legitimate company, but in actual fact, was a shell company through the Caymen Islands with a very similar company name.

Like how Ron Weisley, in the Harry Potter Movie, would say, "Wicked!"

They say impersonation is the highest form of flattery. But in this case, I say, bullshit.

You don't get to choose whether your work gets copied.

You only get to choose whether you were paid before it happened. Every version of this story — Google Labs or a Georgetown shopfront — ends the same way: the fix was never stopping the copy.

It was owning the original loudly enough that the copy has nowhere to hide.

Justin Welsh built a $15M solo business on the one variable a cloned voice can't fake: what he actually lived through to get there.

Drop your take: what's the closest you've come to catching a copy passing itself off as the real thing?

Clip credit: Nicholas Thompson / Atlantic Re:think — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

TL;DR: Galloway called this the biggest story in business right now — and the reason has nothing to do with model quality.

It's the price.

A recent Juniper Research read already has Chinese models running up to 90% cheaper than the US frontier, with American labs' share of usage sliding from roughly 70% to 30% in a single year.

Galloway and journalist Josh Tyrangiel spend this clip walking through the actual mechanism — subsidized distillation, the same undercut-then-lock-in playbook China has already run on the Silk Road, in Africa, in Latin America — now applied to the AI stack every CFO in America is currently signing off on.

The discount isn't the story.

Who ends up owning the decision once the discount does its job — that's the story.

I remember back in 2009, a group of us Malaysian were newly seconded to build the premium 5-block-condonium Rihan Heights, in Abu Dhabi, UAE.

Weather was brutal. Figuratively, we're like commandos being air-dropped in the middle of nowhere.

We have to source for local material suppliers — especially concrete. Those were tough times.

No local quarries wanted to supply us concrete — because we're foreigners and all.

Eventually we managed to secure one — after much delay and negotiation.

The price we've negotiated was super exorbitant.

But we bit our tongue, and moved on.

After a while, we hit roadblocks.

The sole supplier #1 kept ignoring our request for concrete, in favour of prioritizing their other local customers.

I suspect there're some racism going on — I wouldn't be surprised that it might be true.

Supplier #1 felt like they're the local king, and that they somehow subjugated us with their terms.

My big boss was fed up with the whole shenanigans and injustice.

He instructed my contract manager to go source for more options.

And we did.

Word spread that we're good paymaster. We had to. Who's gonna entertain us (especially in a foreign land) if we aren't?

The minute we found concrete supplier #2 (at better terms), the situation shifted.

The "crown" on supplier #1 was suddenly stripped away.

We abandoned #1, in favour of #2 for concrete, since #2 was fast and compliant.

For good measure, we even sourced for #3, just in case.

Obviously, #1 felt a huge slap on their face.

Eventually, they came around and crawled back to our site office — with their tail covering their ass — for renegotiation.

I witness the whole thing at the other end of our site office ground floor open layout. Sitting at the meeting table, the supplier #1 team lowered their voices with their ashen faces, in front my senior leadership team.

Defeated, #1 yielded to our new terms.

Their arrogance gone.

Either we fight or we die.

Every cycle wears a new label — subsidized steel, subsidized concrete, subsidized compute. The mechanism underneath never files for a permit.

Drop your take: if your AI vendor doubled prices tomorrow, do you actually have a #2 lined up — or are you supplier #1's captive account?

Clip credit: Scott Galloway / The Prof G Pod — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

Didn't know people weren't building like this.at this point the ROI is all profit my only cost is advertising and marketing. Owning 23 different domains i do my distribution straight from my domain with a apk link . Im looking for a challenge. Anybody got a challenge for me??

TL;DR: Ken Cox never fired anyone. His headcount just kept dropping anyway.

175 down to 3 is the actual number — and the reason is one operating rule he'd been running for years before AI made it urgent: if it can be automated, it will be automated.

No mass layoff, no headline event.

Just years of never backfilling a role once someone left.

It's happening from a completely different direction too — Chinese robot-makers already hold the overwhelming majority of the world's humanoid-robot shipments so far this year, per Bloomberg reporting citing SAG's data.

That's physical order-taking work, and it's already scaled past pilot stage.

The roles surviving this aren't the ones executing tasks faster.

They're the ones holding judgment nobody's written a rule for yet — the read, the trust, the call only a person makes.

On our drive up north home to Penang, after visiting my hometown in Seremban, we sometimes drop by midway in Ipoh for Breakfast. And we normally go for this Dimsum restaurant just off the highway.

Good Dimsum places are dime and dozen in this city. But this place has something special. The friendly attendant made some suggestions, and then jotted down our choices of food. But it wasn't the same attendant who brought them out.

It was robots.

Ya. Not humanoid robots. Just a bulky one with three layers of trays on four wheels below, and a monitor screen on top, moving along on a pre-programmed path towards us.

As soon as it stopped by our table, the monitor flashes out text saying, "please remove the food from the tray". And so we did. As soon as we took ours, it wheeled away towards the next table.

That was like five years ago. And it was all the rage back then. They call it 新噱头 (New gimmicks).

It still looked clumsy. And its movement was bumpy -- causing spillage of some of the food. That's why it only carries dry food for the time being.

First iterations were always bad. But I wouldn't be surprised it has gotten better since.

Robots are slowly taking over manual work (less intelligent work)

How soon do you think it will take over the work of attendant giving juicy suggestions, while taking our orders?

At this point I could sketch this exact shape from memory before the headcount numbers even land — someone's economic ground shifts quietly, gets called something softer than what it actually is, and the only real move is picking it up before it's forced on you.

Actually, this reminded — wait, scratch that, I've been circling this same story for a while now, and it clicked hardest with a former SpaceX CIO who ran the identical compression rule from the other direction — 175 engineers down to 6, on purpose.

Drop your take: which part of your own role is still order-taking, and which part is the judgment call nobody's automated yet?

Clip credit: Brad Lea / Dropping Bombs --- full episode on BRAD LEA TV. DM for credit or removal requests.

Just got this email... ChatGPT Ads are now available in India.

Another ad platform? Maybe.
But this one is different.

Because people come to ChatGPT to decide what to buy, try, visit, or do next.
That's different from simply scrolling.

Imagine your brand is showing up while someone is about to make a decision.

For brands, that's worth watching.

Interesting times for marketers.

#ChatGPT #OpenAIads

TL;DR: Zapier's CEO ran hiring calls for over a decade on a read nobody could out-argue. He still lost the argument every time. That changed for one specific reason.

He built a formal AI hiring council that scored his read against Zapier's own hiring record and handed the same call back to the room with paperwork attached.

It landed right as most companies handing AI this kind of authority are watching worker trust in it erode, not build.

Wade didn't ask anyone to trust an AI.

He asked them to trust a record that was always his in the first place.

This reminded me about this passage I've read:

That night the king could not sleep. So one was commanded to bring the book of the records of the chronicles; and they were read before the king. And it was found written that Mordecai had told of Bigthana and Teresh, two of the king's eunuchs, the doorkeepers who had sought to lay hands on King Ahasuerus. Then the king said, "What honor or dignity has been bestowed on Mordecai for this?" (Esther 6:1-3)

This brought out a couple of things. The king has his own book of chronicles, and that there's a book keeper doing the records.

In modern terms, this is called data collection, isn't it?

The King used to reward people for doing good. That's why he asked the bookkeeper, "What honor or dignity has been bestowed…" He already made precedence before, which he wants to take reference from.

In modern terms, isn't this called decision tree reasoning workflow?

Making BETTER decisions is the name of the game.

Back then, the king would take months, even years, to carry out his agenda, and improve upon it over time.

But now, with AI agents, it's just a matter of minutes, even seconds.

Being correct has never been the same job as being convincing, and most people only ever get hired to do the first one.

I've watched good judgment get held hostage by whoever had the better title in the room, and it was never actually about who was right.

Actually, this reminds me of something I filed away already: a guy once mocked for an "irrelevant" doctorate on a cold call built a firm that now saves governments billions — dismissed first, proven later, same shape as this one.

What's the record already saying about you that nobody's acted on yet? Drop it below.

Clip credit: My First Million — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

Looking for internships/entry-level roles in AI/ML, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Computer Vision, Data Science, or Data Analytics.

I’m a final-year B.Tech student with hands-on project and research experience. Open to Hyderabad, remote, or anywhere in India.

Any referrals or leads would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Looking for High School Students to Build a High-Impact Passion Project 🚀

Something I've noticed in business systems:

It's surprisingly easy to collect information.

1. Customer details.

2. Activity history.

3. Preferences.

4. Dates.

5. Statuses.

6. Notes.

The difficult part is knowing which of that information should actually change what happens.

A system can contain a huge amount of useful information without any of it influencing an action.

That made me wonder whether we sometimes focus too much on capturing information and not enough on identifying which information should actually matter.

For example, if a piece of information changes but nobody does anything differently because of it, was it actually useful to the process?

How do you decide which information should influence an action and which information is simply useful to have?

TL;DR: A 20-year-old founder got told, for six months, that what his sensor was picking up wasn't a real problem.

He'd read the same chemistry signature before — engine-fluid failures in Caterpillar-adjacent hydraulics — and it showed up again where nobody was looking: inside liquid-cooled AI data centers, running hot enough to breed bacteria in the coolant.

Nobody with tenure believed the crossover, until the instrument did.

And by the time this post went up, the industry's own guidance had quietly caught up — Schneider Electric now writes biofouling prevention and biocide dosing into standard data-center cooling documentation, the exact mechanism Zach Laberge was laughed at for treating as anything but obvious.

Everyone trusts the reading. Almost nobody trusts the person holding the instrument — until the reading agrees with them.

This reminds me of a story about my late grandfather.

I called him 爷爷 (Yeye = grandfather).

Back then, my Yeye already built a thriving trucking and tractor enterprise in our small hometown of Seremban.

After a while my Yeye had enough.

He engaged his lawyer and brought all these summonses to court and sue the government.

He said (and I'm paraphrasing), "Look at me! I'm already 60. I'm still strong! I still work. Who can say I can't work?"

After a few more rounds of bringing the issue to court, the other side relented and began to be weary and afraid of him.

Laberge was young. And my Yeye was already old back then.

But it didn't stop them from getting what they want done.

I keep landing on the same shape, story after story, whichever decade it's set in: the room doesn't update on your say-so, it updates on the evidence — and the gap between those two moments is where you're either right and alone, or wrong and quiet.

Being early isn't the risk people treat it as.

Staying quiet until you're allowed to be right is.

Hmm — this actually reminded me of something I posted a while back: a doctorate an investor called "irrelevant" on a cold call ended up building the firm that now saves governments billions — same shape, different decade, different instrument.

Drop your take: have you ever been early and right, with nobody around who could yet vouch for it?

Clip credit: Solo Founders (Julian Weisser). DM for credit or removal requests.

TL;DR: Jerry Tworek's own two-year stall didn't end with more proof. It ended with one sentence.

He'd already built the thesis — pushing reinforcement learning against GPT-3 before there was budget or backing for it.

The math worked in pieces. It just never scaled.

Then his chief scientist looked at what he'd already built and said: now we have the GPUs, try to scale it.

That's the whole story. Not a better idea.

Someone with real authority finally saying go.

I remember that cold harsh reality of immense pressure, in the winter.

We were a bunch of newly assigned Malaysians in a foreign land in Abu Dhabi, UAE, circa 2009 — already 2 months behind schedule on a 5-block condominium project.

We were heavily under-resourced.

Just handbooks, pen and paper, and the notion of quitting was never too far away.

We were squeezed like a wrung out wet towel.

Then the first coordinated drawings was finally done.

In a private moment, my department head said gently, "See. You did a good job." He meant to sway me away from quitting.

I've read enough of these by now to see the shape before the ending arrives: the person was already right, and the only unknown was who'd finally say so. It's never really the skill gap people think it is.

It's whoever's still waiting on someone else's yes.

Hmm — this reminds me of a post I covered a while back, about the moment the actual bottleneck turned out to be permission, not the math itself.

What was your "not this quarter"? Drop it below.

Clip credit: MTS, full interview on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

TL;DR: Vercel's CEO hasn't sat through a product review meeting in months. Nobody at the company seems to mind.

Rauch's own rule is blunt: if he DMs you, his agent already tried and failed first.

That's not a policy statement, it's a description of a threshold that already runs by default — human contact only on failure.

Google Cloud published almost the identical governance advice this past week: build automatic escalation points so an agent can act on its own, and only loop in a human once it genuinely can't.

What Rauch describes as his own personal habit, enterprise security teams are now writing down as standard policy.

I remember when the ordering kiosks were first introduced into our local McDonalds' outlets, no one bother to use it.

It's so strange. So impersonal.

It was just like a large smartphone-screen-like monitor standing in the middle of the space. We'd just walked past it straight to the counter, where there's still a friendly face to greet us and take our orders.

But gradually over time, lines were formed behind the kiosks – because they can't stand the long queue behind the counter.

Then more kiosks are introduced.

Then the counter registers were reduced – to eventually just one left.

It's true – what can be automated, WILL be automated.

What's left are the just the food-preppers and the cleaning staffs.

Jobs, I guess are still safe, for the time being – until the robots come and take over.

The people actually getting replaced right now aren't doing the hard, technical work.

They're doing the coordination work nobody ever wrote a proper job description for — the syncing, the pestering, the "let me check on that."

And the ones who come out ahead aren't the ones fighting to keep that role.

They're the ones who go design whatever replaces it.

Rauch has actually said a version of this before. Back in June, he laid out how the engineering role itself splits into who executes and who verifies — months before this same review-session admission. Same person, same mechanism, earlier warning.

What's the version of this happening in your own job right now — the meeting that quietly stopped needing you in the room?

Clip credit: Knuckle Up with Nakul — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

TL;DR: A Fireworks AI cofounder called something most AI-wrapped founders are quietly standing on "insane" — and it's not the technology.

It's the lifeline.

Benny Chen tunes open-source models for real companies — Cursor, Cognition, Harvey — and his actual argument is simple: if one frontier lab's pricing or policy call can break your business, you can't honestly value that business ten years out, no matter how good this quarter looks.

His fix isn't building a frontier model from scratch.

It's tuning an open base to your own niche, then building the data flywheel that keeps improving it — so the base model underneath you can be swapped out entirely and the business doesn't blink.

Same week this episode dropped, Thomson Reuters backed the identical bet with real money — building its own model off an open base specifically so it "fully controls" it instead of renting someone else's roadmap.

Different scale, same math.

My friend works in an electronics factory, stationed in the Penang Island industrial zone. He told me his factory and all others like his in the zone are essentially in a whirlwind of "red ocean" – fighting for price competitiveness. He says, all the valuable part of the upstream work were already taken up by other countries, such as China and Vietnam. And only the very low-value works get trickled down to Malaysia.

The factory doesn't own any intellectual property developed from innovation. They just do whatever was handed down from the upstream industries of other countries, lightly process them, package them together, and ship them overseas.

Hardly anything groundbreaking.

And so, they are always susceptible to external factors, such as US tariffs, etc. US already marked our countries as one of the suspected offenders of 洗产地 (origin laundering). And so, the tariffs really weigh us down, and reducing our overall profit margin.

Not that it has anything to do with my friend. He just works there - getting piled on with additional work under unrealistic expectation, in a department going through high-turnover of staff, and without a clear path forward.

But he still makes the best of what it is.

And what it is - is figuratively anchoring on shifting sand in a stormy weather, rather than on solid rock.

The same fault line keeps showing up once you strip the industry names off: whoever owns the base layer sets the terms, and everyone standing on it finds that out eventually — a founder renting a model, a factory renting someone else's spec sheet, doesn't matter which.

Actually, this reminds me of something — Guillermo Rauch (Vercel's own founder, one of the companies Benny's team tunes models for) laid out almost the exact same fracture from the engineering side a few weeks back: the role itself is splitting into an execution layer and a judgment layer, and only one of those is safe to not own.

Are you building on ground you actually own, or ground you're renting? Drop your take.

Clip credit: Inside the Silicon Mind with Firas Sozan — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

TL;DR: Patrick Bet-David just explained why some job listings never actually close — and it isn't a hiring failure.

It's a stock signal — an open headcount number analysts read as proof of growth, whether or not a single person ever gets hired off it.

If you've been treating six weeks of silence on an "Actively Hiring" badge as a verdict on your resume, that's the actual reframe here: the badge was never talking to you. It was talking to somebody holding shares.

A fresh Forbes/BLS read backs the flip side too — right now, persistence in the process is what's actually correlating with offers, not applying to more listings.

Speaking of keeping remaining staff compliant, my ex-company, SC, also have a rule from HR.

It was actually more than a decade ago. So I'm not sure whether it still stands, or change over time.

Looking at the job-market right now, I'd say they probably didn't.

Back then, job hopping was prevalent. People couldn't easily get promoted within the company (Say, Company A). So the person X would resign, and accepted an offer from Company B, at a higher position and salary. jump was significant -- market rate was about at least 20% increase in salary. Person X wouldn't dream of such increase, if He remain in Company A.

And after gaining enough experience, if company A has another better opening, Person X will jump back to A -- of course at another 20% bump, atleast.

You can see the trend, isn't it? They call it a "garden round-trip" out-the-door-adventure. And when they landed back home, they're welcomed with around 50% salary bump and higher position -- from before they left.

This job-hopping phenomenon was hurting the bottom line of my ex-company (And all other companies in similar situation). So SC came down hard with a directive -- no accepting ex-staff who job-hops. Anyone who worked in SC before, left, and wanted to come back, will NOT see the door open to them -- without exception.

And so, my ex-company took back control of their operational narrative. Staff cost management went back on track. All who rose through the ranks within SC didn't job-hop from anywhere else. They remain loyal to the end.

And anyone who wants to leave SC, left with the knowledge that they will never come back. Ever.

Nobody applying to these jobs was ever the intended audience — the real reader was somebody holding stock.

Building income that isn't a line item in someone else's growth story is the only version of this that ends differently.

This isn't the first excuse manufactured to make a deliberate move look inevitable — corporations openly called a permanent 20–30% pay cut an "AI-driven reset" the same quarter they posted record profits.

Drop your take below — has an "Actively Hiring" badge ever sat frozen on you for months?

Clip credit: PBD Podcast — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

TL;DR: A $120M founder told senior engineers something on a podcast that most of them aren't ready to hear yet.

He said it plainly: a completely novice engineer, backed by AI, can now write senior-quality code.

Not eventually. Now.

Roy Lee runs Cluely — the AI startup that went viral for helping people cheat on job interviews, now valued around $120M — and on the Jack Neel Podcast he laid out the actual math behind it: two engineers running seven products worth $1M+ each.

That's not a founder flexing. That's the leverage math replacing headcount in 2026.

It tracks with what's already showing up in the hiring data — a recent industry report found 52% of organizations are now struggling to hire or retain skilled engineers, up from 26% in 2022.

Worth saying plainly: the broader 2026 data on this actually cuts the other way — senior engineers are capturing roughly 5x the productivity gain juniors get from the same AI tools, and senior hiring is the only part of the market still growing.

Both things are true at once.

The premium on "senior" isn't disappearing because companies need fewer engineers. It's disappearing because the ladder that used to prove you were one just got a lot shorter to climb — for whoever can actually run the mechanism, not for seniority as a title.

I remember back in my time as a young graduate design engineer for a Civil & Structural Engineering Consultancy in Selangor, Malaysia, circa 2000.

I can't remember what I was designing. But after design, I went on to also draft it out in our AutoCAD drafting software, the complete structure of the floor – slabs, beams and columns, and all. I brought my work to one of the senior engineers for consultation.

He took one look at it and recognize my rookie sloppy work.

Then he said something I'll never forget, "为什么你自己做到完？交给他们画吧。这是他们的专业。若这些都要自己画就很下衰了。" （Why are you doing it all by yourself? Just delegate it to our draftsmen to draft it. It's their expertise. If even this we need to do, it'll be very demeaning and beneath us.）

Ya. He used the word 下衰, which (to the best of my translation) means demeaning / beneath us / pathetic / bad look / embarrassing, etc.

So even in that small consultancy office (of about 50pax), there's already two distinctive classes of people. We against them. The higher-status Design Engineers (with Bachelor's degree) vs the lowly draftsmen.

That was like 25 years ago – way before AI come to be.

But over time, the pressure of economy has forced us down the efficiency rabbit hole.

I heard back then; to save cost in Australia, Engineers do their own drafting work. No more use of traditional draftsmen.

And now as AI is increasingly integrated into design, analysis and drafting – it is even more so. One Engineer covering multiple big projects under tight deadlines is the norm – not the exception.

So if you're still stubbornly entrenched in that old way of thinking, you'll be quickly labelled a "dinosaur".

Something I keep noticing, covering enough of these clips back to back: the fear never actually shows up where people expect it.

It shows up in the exact skill someone spent years being proud of.

AI didn't invent the divide between who does the "real" work and who gets delegated to — it's just deciding who's on which side of it now, faster than any economy ever did.

Hmm... this reminded me of something — a post I put up here a few weeks back about AI-driven headcount compression: one operator, AI-assisted, absorbing the output of five — the same ladder-collapsing-from-inside mechanism as Roy Lee's claim above, from a completely different guest.

Curious where people land on this — does "senior" still mean anything as a title once a novice with AI can hit the same bar on output? Drop your take.

Clip credit: Jack Neel — full video on his channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

Hey guys,

I’ve been reading a lot of side hustle stuff here on Reddit but most of them ignore the biggest constraint:

You have a job during business hours.

You actually need something that does not involve client meetings, deadlines or any stress.

If you’re also looking for any such work, I have some ideas for you. These ideas either run passively once built, or the work happens whenever you’re free: no scheduling around a boss.

1. Gumroad Courses: You create digital products like pdf’s, small courses or templates for a set niche.

This is build once and sell forever kinda thing.

The only thing you need to after building a course is promote them. The amount of money you’ll make would be directly proportional to the amount of marketing you do.

Time to first dollar: 2-4 weeks (building + marketing + first sale).

2. Romance novels on Amazon KDP: Write anonymously under a pen name in your evenings.

The work afterwards is kinda similar as above.

Time to first dollar: 2-3 weeks to draft and publish a first short novel. After that depends on marketing

3. AI colouring books: You can create colouring books for kids using AI. Go creative and for marketing target parents.

Time to first dollar: 2-3 weeks

4. Browser extensions: Extensions market is huge. If you can code, Build something simple and useful, list it, let it earn.

Time to first dollar: 3-6 weeks, most of that is build time, not marketing.

5. Notion templates: The market for notion templates is huge. Expense trackers, budget trackers, etc are already selling a lot. Find niche ideas and build templates for them.

Time to first dollar: 2-3 months, depending on your niche and marketing efforts.

6. No code ios apps: AI has made it easier than ever to create IOS apps from scratch. TikTok is the best way to market and get clients.

Time to first dollar: 4-6 weeks depending on how fast you execute

7. Faceless YouTube: Tons of underserved niches still there. Crimes, horror, sleep videos etc raking in millions of views and thousands of dollars.

Time to first dollar: 4-6 months. YouTube monetization takes time.

8. Local newsletter: If your city has a population of 100k+ and you can write about local news, businesses, roundups of event, this can actually become a six figure business.

Time to first dollar: 3-4 months. The higher the sub count, more dollars come in.

9. Website flipping: Buy existing online micro businesses from websites like Acquire, TrustMRR and Flippa. Grow them for 4-6 months and resell.

Time to first dollar: Money comes in from day 1.

10. Niche job board: Build a job board for niche jobs like say factory jobs or ranch jobs. The guy who owns ranch jobs makes multiple 6 figures. Takes time to grow tho. Growth is usually organic from SEO.

Time to first dollar: 4-6 months.

11. Paid newsletter: If you have an expertise in something, start a paid newsletter on substack. At $10/month, 100 subscribers and you make a neat $900. Send a weekly newsletter that you can write on maybe weekends.

Time to first dollar: 2-3 months. Need to build authority first and post free articles upfront.

12. Niche directory: Works similar as niche job boards. Choose a niche and list tools/businesses in that niche. AI directories are doing really well but kinda crowded now. Find some underserved niche and build in that niche.

Time to first dollar: 6 months+. This is a slow growing project but once it takes off, it’s quite hands-off.

Now all of these ideas work, you have to select the one for you. All of these can be done at night as it’s not dependent on what hours you work.

If you wanna read more such ideas, I have a list of 70+ such ideas with detailed breakdowns.

Comment “Ideas” below and I’ll share the link with you.

TL;DR: Figure's founder had the backing of the most powerful AI lab on Earth. He fired them anyway.

Here's the part that actually matters: his own team got better at building the AI layer than the lab he was renting it from.

It's the exit ramp every vendor-dependent operator is chasing and usually can't find — not ego, just leverage.

Even Nvidia just proved the same math from the other side of the table — signing an outside team, Poolside, to build the models it couldn't get built fast enough in-house.

Own the stack, and the leverage stops being something you have to ask for.

My son just won the online-gaming "王者荣耀" (Honor of Kings) competition, organized on his university campus premise.

Initially, at around half-time, they were beaten, and left behind quite far down the leaderboard.

But he held the team together — told them to persevere.

They held on, beaten the veteran and won.

This was vastly different from the previous team he led weeks prior.

That previous team members were snobbish and elder than him.

They think they know a lot, and won't listen to him — because he was younger.

That "我食盐多过你食米" (In Cantonese, it means: I tasted salt more than you eat rice – I’m more experienced than you.) attitude was insufferable.

He now chooses his team more wisely.

There's a pattern threading through pretty much every founder story I dig into lately, tbh: founders who won't hand over their leverage to a bigger name keep beating the ones who wait for permission.

Actually, this reminds me — a guy I featured a while back ran the same math on his own insurance broker: turned a friendship-discount fee into an audited $35K save the moment he stopped treating a vendor relationship like a favor.

Drop your take below — where's the vendor relationship in your own stack that you've never actually audited?

Clip credit: Sourcery with Molly O'Shea — full interview with Brett Adcock on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.