Listless Labs

@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

AI won’t replace companies. it’ll gut entire departments by 40%. only specialists and operators survive. builders and decision makers. that’s it. everyone else is an expense waiting to be cut.

@KevinNaughtonJr but would you have the likes tho

in the amount of time that people have been claiming AI will replace software engineers you could have completed an entire computer science degree and landed a 6 figure job

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

@listlesslabs what's your timeline for this?

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

@ItsDavidGott got it!

@listlesslabs I messaged you just now… they’re not always going through so wanted to give you a heads up.

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

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

Even the actuaries are wondering what the hell is going on

@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

My first PM job taught me this exact lesson. I had a coworker who was technically brilliant. Best engineer on the team. Could solve problems nobody else could touch. But every deadline was a coin flip. Every meeting might start 10 minutes late. Every commitment came with invisible asterisks. Management stopped giving him the big projects. The math on this is WILD. American companies lose $300 billion annually from workplace stress. And here's the thing Jo is getting at... a huge chunk of that stress comes from unreliable colleagues. When someone misses a deadline, it doesn't just affect their work. It cascades. The PM has to re-plan. The designer has to wait. The launch slips. Other people now have their emergency. A 2025 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine put actual numbers on this. An unreliable manager costs their employer $10,824 per year in burnout-related losses. An unreliable executive costs $20,683. And that's just the direct cost. The second-order effects are where it gets interesting. When you're reliable, your manager stops spending mental energy worrying about your work. That's cognitive load they can redirect elsewhere. You become a net-negative on their stress level. Over time, this compounds into something powerful. The reliable person gets the stretch assignment because the manager knows they'll deliver. The reliable person gets the promotion because leadership trusts them with bigger scope. The reliable person gets the reference becuase their old boss actually wants to vouch for them. Jo is describing a career arbitrage. Everyone is competing on credentials, skills, and networking. Meanwhile the person who just shows up and does what they said they'd do is quietly accumulating trust. Trust is the scarcest resource in organizations. And most people are actively destroying it with small daily choices.

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

Running a few things at once now. Kill some. Double down on others. Test constantly. Feels less like founder. More like head of R&D for my own life. Most advice doesn't fit anymore. The playbooks assume you're all in on one thing. Nobody writes about this version.

@KevinNaughtonJr been looking forward to fractional permissionless work for a while the bottlenecks are mostly trust, security, coordination rather than productivity

now that engineers are 10x more productive with AI i wonder if companies will be chill with people working at multiple companies simultaneously

@BarneyFlames apparent business inefficiencies often have positive social externalities

Say what you will about the big tech firms, they understand the concept of "we need to hire new grads now so we can have trained senior devs in 2-3 years"

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

product management is just human prompt engineering

@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

here are my unpopular opinions (software engineer edition) 1. writing less code and understanding the system deeply will get you promoted faster than shipping features nonstop. 2. most engineers aren’t stuck because of lack of skill, they’re stuck because they avoid ownership and hard conversations. 3. being always online on slack signals poor focus, not high impact. 4. switching stacks every year feels like growth, but depth in one system compounds far more. 5. great engineers think in trade-offs and failure modes, not frameworks and hype.

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

@listlesslabs 🔥 post. This applies to so many industries actually. My friend’s son graduated from Cornell computer science. Can’t find a job. Wonder what will happen to these kids in the next couple of years.

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

@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

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.

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

And this is the biggest cause of product manager discomfort right now. Also the biggest cause of why many companies don’t want to hire PMs in the first place. PMs who were hiding behind “I’m working with engineers 12 hours a day to ship the damn thing” have to finally act like real PMs a16z.com/good-product-m…