The AI paradox: More automation, more humans, more work | Dan Shipper
In a Nutshell
Dan Shipper argues the "AI job apocalypse" is a myth—companies like Every are doubling headcount despite heavy AI adoption because every agent requires ongoing human oversight and maintenance. Work bifurcates into delegating to company-wide super agents (like Shopify's River) and doing most work inside environments like Codex or Claude Co-work, which become the new OS where SaaS tools run internally rather than having AI baked into each product. The core paradox: better models commoditize yesterday's competence faster, creating more human work reviewing slop, integrating outputs, and determining what makes sense for the business—driving demand for PMs, full-stack designers, and "forward deployed engineers" who maintain agent systems.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Dan argues the AI job apocalypse is not happening. He is extremely bullish on product managers and full-stack designers. Every doubled headcount in the past year despite being highly AI-forward. Dan describes himself as simultaneously extremely AI-pilled and very bullish on humans. Automation is a lie. Every agent needs a human.
Despite having so much automation and AI, Dan reports working more, not less. Creativity becomes increasingly valuable to stand out from the constant slop being shipped. Models make yesterday's human competence cheap and commoditized. Humans take frozen human competence from yesterday and use it to make something new and interesting.
Work will split in two directions. First, everyone will have at least one agent they talk to that can receive offloaded work. Second, most work will happen on the computer in an environment like Codex or Claude Co-work, which becomes the operating system for all work including email and documents.
SaaS tools will run within Codex or Claude Code. The SaaS apocalypse is considered dumb. Dan would buy SaaS stocks right now because agents increase the number of SaaS users rather than eliminating them.
Many people are moving to CLI and terminal work. The CLI era was speed-run, was nice while it lasted, but CLIs are considered over.
Sign in to read the full notes
Get access to AI-generated notes, topic timestamps, and more.