Listless Labs

I pay attention to how value moves as constraints change. Everything is a market | Economist, product builder, human

[Listless Labs @listlesslabs]

@damianplayer the real economy has always been builders and decision makers

but economies of scale were unlocked only by the managerial class, the bureaucracy

with barriers to scale being stripped away, so are the extra organizational layers

[Listless Labs @listlesslabs]

@damianplayer the real economy has always been builders and decision makers

but economies of scale were unlocked only by the managerial class, the bureaucracy

with barriers to scale being stripped away, so are the extra organizational layers

[Listless Labs @listlesslabs]

@KevinNaughtonJr but would you have the likes tho

[Listless Labs @listlesslabs]

we're over the event horizon tbh - it's already happened

majority of white collar jobs are pure productivity theater and busywork

this was already true pre AI, just more obvious than ever

plus the leverage of holding onto warm bodies with skills dropped off a cliff with abundant intelligence

we're just waiting for the market to reorganize itself around the new reality

all that said, i'm long term optimistic that most people will still find employment opportunities in the remaining 20% of tasks that are human centric, automation resistant

[Listless Labs @listlesslabs]

we're over the event horizon tbh - it's already happened

majority of white collar jobs are pure productivity theater and busywork

this was already true pre AI, just more obvious than ever

plus the leverage of holding onto warm bodies with skills dropped off a cliff with abundant intelligence

we're just waiting for the market to reorganize itself around the new reality

all that said, i'm long term optimistic that most people will still find employment opportunities in the remaining 20% of tasks that are human centric, automation resistant

[Listless Labs @listlesslabs]

AI isn't going to automate 80% of white collar jobs

But it will automate 80% of white collar tasks

If you understand the difference, ygmi

[Listless Labs @listlesslabs]

@ItsDavidGott got it!

[Listless Labs @listlesslabs]

You used to get paid for your skills / knowledge

Increasingly, pay will be tied to perceived contribution to outcomes

Bad news for technical introverts that just wanna churn outputs

Good news for anyone willing to shamelessly promote themselves

[Listless Labs @listlesslabs]

@GayBearRes Everyone is trying to re-understand their production pipelines while machine intelligence emerges as a novel basic input

[Listless Labs @listlesslabs]

@aakashgupta While AI makes everything more abundant, it's useful to notice what remains scarce

That's where value is headed

Whether the source is lazy humans or AI slop, the world is flooded with unreliability

If you can be reliable, you'll always be in demand

[Listless Labs @listlesslabs]

@TheGeorgePu head of R&D for my own life is my dream job

[Listless Labs @listlesslabs]

@KevinNaughtonJr been looking forward to fractional permissionless work for a while

the bottlenecks are mostly trust, security, coordination rather than productivity

[Listless Labs @listlesslabs]

@BarneyFlames apparent business inefficiencies often have positive social externalities

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

if you want to be an entrepreneur today, i’d take $200k in claude credits over 4 years of random college credits all day

[Listless Labs @listlesslabs]

product management is just human prompt engineering

[Listless Labs @listlesslabs]

@0xlelouch_ everyone is getting a promotion whether they like it or not

the time of hiding behind execution is over

take ownership, exercise judgement - or get left behind

[Listless Labs @listlesslabs]

thanks, David!

crazy time to be a new grad. credentials matter less than ever and junior roles getting hollowed out

when the market starts selecting for judgement, it obviously favors the more experienced

but creates a weird dynamic that mirrors birth rate / population collapse - we stop training replacements for seniors bc we killed the training ground

i suspect the smart companies will recalibrate and keep hiring juniors for that reason

but in the meantime, only real paths seem to be either
a) enter highly competitive job market for small pool of junior roles, or
b) enter highly competitive attention market with portfolio of side projects

whatever it takes to start exercising judgement and building experience, even if compensation is low, those are the efforts that will compound

[Listless Labs @listlesslabs]

engineers are more productive than ever before

this shifts the constraint from "how to build it" to "what to build"

this pushes scarcity from engineering bandwidth to product judgement, coordination capacity

the middle manager product and delivery types will become more valuable as as a result

ie they're likely to earn higher salaries in the coming years

HOWEVER that opportunity may be limited to a very small group of people

with more productive engineers, it's easy to assume that average team sizes will fall, which reduces the demand for management

jevon's paradox suggests that we may actually employ MORE engineers, as a consequence of their efficiency gains, generating even more demand for mgmt roles

here's the possibilities:
1. product and project mgmt roles increase in value, but fewer roles

2. product and project mgmt roles increase in value, with more roles

3. product and project mgmt roles get absorbed into engineering functions and they disappear completely

the value of taste, judgement, and prioritization will radically increase - there's no question

it's only a question of how that increased value gets captured, and by whom

[Listless Labs @listlesslabs]

@0xlelouch_ Best post I've seen all day!

If you're exercising judgment and agency, you'll always be in demand

If you're just following a checklist, you're cooked

[Abhishek Singh @0xlelouch_]

I get why it feels this way. A lot has genuinely changed, and pretending otherwise is just plain wrong.

But what I feel is that tech didn’t stop valuing people but it stopped tolerating invisible value.

What’s actually happening is that communication, judgment, and agency got repriced upward. They carry weightage now.

In the past, you could be a strong individual contributor, ship code, and be mostly insulated. When layoffs happened, they were framed as cost cutting.

Now the bar is explicit and brutal:

- Can you explain why something matters?

- Can you influence decisions, not just implement them?

- Can you own outcomes instead of tasks?

- Can you make trade-offs under uncertainty?

- Can you articulate value to someone non-technical?

AI is eating the parts of the job that were:

Mechanical
Repetitive
Hard to explain but easy to do

What remains is the human layer.

At the end of the day, humans still decide what to build, what to prioritize, what risk to take, and what good even means. A human still has to convince another human to fund, ship, trust, or change something. That hasn’t gone away. If anything, it’s more intensified.

This is why communication is a survival skill:

Writing clearly
Explaining trade-offs
Narrating impact
Saying “no” with reasoning
Saying “yes” with ownership

The engineers who are struggling right now aren’t bad engineers. Many are excellent technically. But they outsourced agency upward for too long. They waited for tickets, for their managers to tell them what to do and I was the same tbh, waited for clarity and direction.

AI didn’t break that model.
The market did.

The engineers who will do well are the ones who:

- Use AI as leverage, not a crutch
- Make themselves legible to the business
- Build context, not just code
- Take responsibility for outcomes, not just deliverables
- Can sit in a room (or call) and think out loud with other humans

Yes, fewer pure coder roles will exist.

But roles that combine:

technical depth
system thinking
communication
and ownership/agency

are becoming more valuable, not less.

Tech didn’t die.
The silent, replaceable version of tech did.

The path forward is more agency, more clarity, and more human skill layered on top of technical skill.

Because in the end, even in an AI-heavy world,
a human still has to look another human in the eye and say: this is worth doing.

[Listless Labs @listlesslabs]

@anujrathi The value of process herding is quickly falling to zero