If most of your job involves mouse clicks at a computer and you get paid more than the cost of the electricity running through it - AI aims to replace you at work. The cost of birthing your digital workaholic self is plummeting with every new published LLM model and every YC demo day. Make no mistake, AI Start Ups are not looking to replace the SaaS incumbents you use everyday, they want to replace YOU. That is why you should replace yourself before someone else, or something else, does. This requires you to learn how to wield these new tools and turn into trivial automations all your tedious and time consuming tasks. You might use these new skills to accelerate your career or, if you hide it from your boss, unlock more leisure time like the capitalist Keynes envisioned with the 15h work week. Let us not forget that even if your job is replaceable, your presence as a parent, a friend, an artist … is not.
Check yo self before yo wreck place yo self.
Is my job really at risk?
When I was at school around the 2000’s, software engineering was a synonym with job security and a good pay - safe from replacement. Confident on this crowd wisdom, I graduated as a software engineer during the ZIRP times, when recruiters would offer heaven on earth to anyone capable of writing a fibonacci pseudocode on a whiteboard. Today, fresh university graduates are facing a contracting market while tools like Cursor or OpenAI Codex substitute most of the “carpentry” work usually assigned to early junior roles. While I still find a strong demand for experienced programmers, it would be reckless to assume this will be the case for the next decade. Not even ‘replacers’ are safe anymore. If your job involves more clicking and typing than human interaction, your job is automatable. Whether they are automated or not, is just a financial calculation.
How likely is my job to be replaced?
I spent my early career applying RPA (Robotic Process Automation) a.k.a. writing routines to replace people’s work. These projects start with an assessment of different processes within the organisation which are then ranked by complexity, running cost and impact (what is the risk if something goes wrong?). RPA was limited to low hanging fruits and custom software to automate more complex workflows was too expensive at that time. AI is commoditising shitty average software, which is arguably most of the software, which is most of the jobs. Like Sama said: We are “entering the fast fashion era of SaaS very soon”. With LLMs, the price of automating and running complex workflows dramatically plummeted, which makes the replacement of your labour wage highly dependent of the risk/impact factor of your tasks. If the company needs someone to blame when the process fails, your job is relatively secure as you become a “box ticker” role. If not, then your salary better be cheaper than the tokens it would be required to replace you.
My relationship with automation
I will always remember how in an elevator at Park Avenue in New York, a client asked me if automation would leave many people without a job. My naive answer: “It will create more jobs than it destroys”. His answer? - “I really hope not, that’s not why we brought you” - queue in Rich Man Laughing. He was admirably honest and despite the optics, I don’t think he is in the wrong. I do believe that RPAs together with LLMs, now rebranded AI Agents, will get rid of many decent paying jobs while creating a few extremely high paying jobs. I don’t think we will have an employment crisis but more of a “Bullshit” job epidemic (David Graeber - Bullshit Jobs) paired with lower wages (Gary Stevenson - The Trading Game). This idea deserves its own article and I highly recommend both authors as they give a very clear picture of today’s job and economic realities. (If you are curious, this video makes a good introduction.) So, why do I care? Because I want people to leverage these tools to enhance their human experience. How you decide to use such tools is up to you; automate your job and advance your career, use AI to filter the “brainrot” out of your social media, use it to scalp scalpers, leverage N8N to apply for thousands of job positions, maybe even work a few of them in parallel, … I just want to show you how easy it is to use such tools to replace yourself out of the tasks you don’t want to do any longer.
Beware the snaike oil
I am not selling a course and please hold me accountable if I ever do (N8N automation is starting to become the new get-rich-quick-scheme for fake gurus). My payment is your attention and your feedback - nothing more. In return, I guarantee you handcrafted articles - 100% BIO writing. Not because I think it is ‘better’ but because I respect the time you invest reading this. Linked In posts in the other hand … I might automate some of those.
My next publications will include automation guides, benchmarks and experiments ranging from practical to utterly petty and useless. Use them for entertainment, inspiration or as a guideline to build your own agents and workflows, to free up some time, to make a side hustle or to simply make your own whacky AI Agent for fun.
I want you to replace yourself so others won’t be able to. Take yourself out of all those tasks you consider futile, meaningless or just boring. Place yourself in a path of your own choosing and around those who value you most. For the birthdays, summer afternoons and friendly dinners where your participation is indispensable. Use this material at your discretion and let it contribute to a future where replacing our work becomes easier but our human experience remains, as it always have been; irreplaceable.
-Replacing is Pura Vida
Alexis Gamboa
alexis.gamboa@loopid.com