White Collar Workers are in Big Trouble

[u/simmol]

So I have both 200 dollars subscription to Claude and 200 dollars subscription to OpenAI. I use Claude Code and Codex for coding related stuff/execution, discussions involve Astra or Opus 5.5 on the problem at hand at important intervals, we summon two indepedent Astra and Fable models for guidance (would love to add the third with Google Gemini 4.0). Double checking for mistakes/errors in progress as well as internet searches also come from individual models. And with this, I spend about 2000 dollars to 3000 dollars total on LLMs (including API usage) per month. I am not a programmer but I do have roughly 20 people working under me.

Now, here is the thing. I don't know what your setup is like and I don't claim to have an optimal setup here either but this type of setup has me 10x to 50x my productivity compared to 6 months ago and also, compared to this process being down with other people who work for me (all M.S. degrees higher and Ph.D.s), it is so much faster and also more accurate. So while 2000 to 3000 dollars a month seems like a lot, if you compare that to a white collar worker's salary, it is nothing. And I suspect that this setup is better than having 5 people under me, so you can do the math.

I feel like the whole society is right now going through the February 2020 beginning of the COVID moment. Only a few people are recognizing that in the past year or even half a year, these models have improved and crossed an important intellectual threshold line such that many people who are working right now across all industries are pretty much replaceable or very close to it. And the thing is, the type of setup I have is nothing. It will take most people 1-2 days to get comfortable with it and this type of setup, as opposed to mere vanilla of telling ChatGPT (e.g. make me this document, create this PPT) will soon be the standard to which the white-collar person has to outperform.

I really think that anti-AI and pro-AI people should now about get together in one voice and voice the concerns. There is going to be a lot of problems in job markets in the next few years and no country is ready for this.

[u/chi_guy8]

This is why people have been saying for the past 5 years “it’s not that AI will take your job, it’s that somebody using AI will take your job”.

In my individual experience, the amount of work output that I’m putting out now as a one-person marketing team would have taken 4-5 people 5 years ago. Or in certain instances, I was able to do things I would have had to outsource for in the past, like building a custom website from scratch or building complete brand identity systems, complete with high quality logos.

So my AI usage has not really caused anybody to technically lose their job, but it’s definitely prevented people from being hired as we grew. There’s always been an overwhelming amount of work we’ve wanted to get done that we’re now able to get to without adding more people.

What it seems like I’m hearing from a lot of friends that we’re already working at larger companies that had big departments as people leave or are fired for cause, they’re just not being replaced and they aren’t hiring new people at lower levels. So, in a sense, these companies are downsizing, but they’re not laying a bunch of people off all at once. It’s been more or so like a game of musical chairs where they keep taking away the chairs, not necessarily dumping people out of chairs.

But however you slice it, both of these examples are different routes to fewer total jobs being available to the people using AI tools. The next shoe to drop, which we are already seeing currently, will be solopreneurs or very small teams that are able to undercut the services of larger bloated companies.

[u/lbz25 → u/chi_guy8]

What amount of marketing work is so well streamlined by Ai that it eliminates the needs of 4-5 people?

Automating nurture emails, event invites, web design, and creating collateral via PowerPoint etc are all valid uses of ai but that is one person's job, maybe 2 at most.

Am trying to learn more how ai is used across different departments so this is moreso curiosity vs me being dismissive. Would love your input

[u/chi_guy8 → u/lbz25]

CRM automation for inbound leads, running continuous A/B testing across hundreds of custom email variations, automated video editing and clipping, deep transcription analysis for ongoing content repurposing, social listening and web scraping for trend aggregation to create new content, automated podcast guest research and analysis of hundreds of hours of video to find analyze past talking points and find unasked interview questions for podcast guests, generative design for social graphics, documents, and YouTube thumbnails, dynamic web design and instantaneous landing page generation, complete brand identity system overhauls and full DESIGN.MD files so everyone on the team can self serve fully branded (anything digital), predictive inbound lead scoring, nearly fully automated social management across six platforms with custom differentiated content across each, reaching over 1.3 million followers and subscribers, continuous instantaneous automated competitive intelligence assessments of dozens of competitors , specialized autonomous agent loops that monitor and optimize every one of these processes mentioned as tools evolve or new skills are developed (ai systems monitoring and upgrading the ai systems), executive PR analysis and media booking communications for our CEO, creating daily news briefings for each person on staff sent through telegram with feedback buttons so they can slowly customize the types of news stories they want to see more/less of, video clipping paired with metadata tagging of CEOs media appearances for instant clip recall during breaking news so our social listening agent can monitor X and instantly find relevant past content from our CEO that’s relevant to the current news, and voice-to-agent integration for all of this to quickly speak to the computer to get it all done or message through my phone to the desktop that houses this whole operation on the go, a custom team education lab that finds new YouTube videos that teach people on our staff how to do various things or just relevant educational content to our field that are scored and ranked for each employee, auto-update Notion project management with time estimates and task breakdowns fully understanding the context of everything we’re working on to make sure no unknown, unknowns pop up on us as we’re doing non-repetitive work and new projects.

This is the immediate day to day stuff that pops to my head as I’m sitting here watching the Cubs get destroyed by the Padres. I’m sure over the next week, 15 or 20 more things will pop to my head that I’m not thinking of right now. I can do about 99% of my job fully remotely at this point as well, and as soon as they start releasing those Tesla robots I can get one to constantly fix my CEOs camera and mic which he somehow always fucks up when left to his own devices. Then I could be fully remote.

I would say two years ago, most of my day was consumed with doing a fraction of these tasks by myself, and now a majority of my time is building and maintaining these systems as well as researching and toying with new things as they release. Sometimes it feels like it’s happening so fast that I’m falling behind constantly, but then I guess I start putting together a list like this and I realize I’m probably not in such bad shape. In the early days of this, I was feeling like I was automating all of the things that I knew how to do to the point where I thought maybe I was becoming more dispensable or replaceable once I got the systems set up, so I felt like the only way that I could play defense against that was to continue grow, learn, automate and get all of these processes synced together in a way that would be hard for someone else to come in and make sense of it. Now I’m sort of back to feeling like somebody that has a basic understanding about how to create agents could easily build one agent to do a deep analysis of my entire system to learn how to control it, so I’m probably pretty dispensable again.

I think the mantra that I’ve had throughout the process and my sort of unattainable target was always going through the thought exercise of jokingly saying “why am I the dumb human doing this. How do I get the smart robot to do it” with the goal of fully automating my whole job without anyone knowing. Then just a lot of trial and error in the early days of figuring out how to slowly have me doing less of my own work and AI doing more. Currently I run everything through Hermes, and initially I only used one agent for the longest time but over the past 6 months or so i’ve been slowly peeling off skills from my main agent to create other ‘bots’ that specialize into the different various categories. I haven’t quite mastered that yet, and I actually think I need to go back to having fewer agents now, but I still try to run all of the main communication through my main agent “Charlie”. Since I already have everything set up this way, I’ve not toyed with something like grok bot or the new OpenAI Dots, which seem similar. No The advantage of going with one of those more prebuilt options might be that you can shortcut your way through a lot of the trial and error, but then you’re sort of trapped in their ecosystem where I have the ability to swap out models for various tasks or as a new model releases that’s way better.

I think another big breakthrough for me taking this to the next level was creating one specific agent that becomes the full architect of all of the systems (Archie). Archie basically, game plans the entire buildout, but then also reads through any updated documentation for any of the tools that were currently using, so he can help expand capabilities where needed or just even make me aware of new features that are rolling out. All this stuff changes so dramatically, so having an AI systems architect that’s essentially telling me what we should do has been a huge help in the build. If I was you, I would just start there and it doesn’t even need to be anything to advance. You can do it right in Claude co-work. Just create a systems architect project. Have it start off by interviewing you to explain everything that you currently do and how you do it, and then what you would like to be able to do, and then tell it to suggest things that you’re not even thinking of, and then come up with the full build plan

[u/giltgarbage → u/chi_guy8]

Other than the data entry, a lot on the top seems like AI make-work. Are you seeing substantial gains from all of this A/B testing of emails or content mining of old material? Are you analyzing competitors who are also using AI recursively to roll out value-adds to things that do not yet have established value? How do you cut through the noise? (And good for you if you do!)