gonafonso

How I Made My Career in Web3 (And Why You Can't Do the Same) My path into this industry is dead. ChatGPT and other LLMs killed it. Let me explain. I became a writer through Web3. Started as a ghostwriter back in 2017 when the industry was still the wild west. You got paid in Bitcoin at the time, stablecoins didn't exist yet. Opportunities were everywhere. If you could write, you had work. Today that world is mostly gone. There are still a handful of ghostwriting positions out there (ex: writing a book on someone's behalf, managing a CEO's LinkedIn presence) but they are few and far between. I knew this was coming. I just didn't expect it to happen so fast. Web3 is an internet-native industry, which makes it one of the first movers in AI adoption. What happens here is a preview of what's coming everywhere else. And I had a front row seat. In 2023 I was making very good money as an editor at a small NFT publication, a sister outlet to @cryptodotnews. With ChatGPT I could churn out a fully written, image-ready, SEO-optimised article in under 10 minutes. It paid $25 a piece. Then NFTs died. The publication closed. I transitioned to social media management. Not by choice, but because it was what was available. The pay was decent and I could still do some writing. In 2024 I landed a role at Zokyo, one of the oldest Web3 auditing firms. Then that dried up too: I was recently let go. And here I am. But here's what bothers me more than any of that: AI didn't just kill the job market for writers. It's killing mentorship. The way we actually learn. When I came up in the industry, I was trained by Antonio Madeira. Most of you won't know him, but he wrote for CoinTelegraph, CryptoSlate, and other major publications. He was strict. High standards, strong work ethic, zero tolerance for laziness. It wasn't an easy process, but it made me genuinely good. We didn't even use Grammarly. We checked everything ourselves. Every transition and sentence had to earn its place. That kind of mentorship is disappearing. Not because people don't want it, but because it's easier to ask AI. Why struggle through the learning curve when the tool just does it for you? Well, the struggle was actually the point. When we use expert tools as a novice, it makes our life easier but we don’t learn any new skills. We simply become dependent. AI isn’t making us more skillful. Quite the opposite. And we have data to prove it. For the first time in recorded history, we are watching a new generation grow up dumber than the previous one. Gen Z is scoring lower than Millennials across every major cognitive metric: attention, memory, reading comprehension, mathematical ability, and general IQ. The villain here isn't AI itself. It's the removal of friction. The uncomfortable process that actually builds a capable mind. So what's the takeaway? • Keep learning: Build new skills and sharpen the ones you already have. The people who survive this transition won't be the ones who outsourced their thinking. • Skillmax your AI usage: Most marketers will eventually be replaced. The ones who remain will be one-person teams running agents that do the work of entire departments. • Invest in your network: Most of the jobs I landed came through friends and people in my circle. In a world of infinite AI-generated content, human trust becomes the scarcest resource of all. • Build a personal brand: CVs matter less and less. A recognisable human voice, authority in your space, and a track record of real work will cut through all of it. Build in public. Your name and your story cannot be replicated. I'm currently out of a job. But I've never been more clear on what actually matters and where we are going.

3 days without new @claudeai features, what are the devs even doing