r/FutureOfWork

Everyone's reacting to the "less people in 5 years" line. That's not the part I'd sit with.

The part that actually matters is how Uber decides — an adoption leaderboard, tracking who's using the tools and how much, feeding straight into headcount math.

That's not a hypothetical for some future reorg.

That's a live measurement system, running today, on people who have no idea they're on it.

 

I've watched that exact math play out before — in concrete and steel, not a dashboard, years before anyone called it AI.

I had the opportunity to be involved in the early design stage of an expansion project for a famous beverage manufacturing plant in Taoyuan, Taiwan – back in 2021. The beverage brand name is so famous, you'll instantly recognize it. So, I won't name it here.

Our team got to work on cool stuff - latest advanced technologies in high-density and automated racking system, bottle conveyor system, robotics, beverage packers, clean room environment, etc. – things that are expected in a high-tech. manufacturing plant nowadays.

Looking at the projected 10-year production forecast, with the given magnitude of the hardware, I would say they are planning to go big.

It's quite a sizeable expansion.

And you would think that they'd increase their headcount proportionately, right?

You'd be surprised. There IS headcount increase, but not as proportional.

It seems as though the machines were taking more centre stage than the humans. Even the office space increase wasn't even a top priority in the design. Their existing office layout can still accommodate the projected increase in manpower.

It was as if human beings are being set aside to make room for more artificial things – even though what they produce are meant to serve human beings.

Kind of ironic, isn't it?

That was back in 2021 before AI come into the picture. Now the compression is even more acute, it seems.

https://preview.redd.it/twllzlreobkh1.jpg?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1c757cce2c856bc267f2ba2acc634fd325ed9ad6

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Different guest, same fork in the road: does the tool serve you, or does it just get pointed at you.

The industries change.

The question underneath never does — who's holding the ledger, and whether you're the one reading it or the one being read.

A 2026 WRITER survey backs the pattern from the outside too: 75% of execs privately admit their AI rollout is mostly for show, while the people actually inside the tooling get promoted 3x more often and ship 5x more.

That's the leaderboard, confirmed from a different angle.

 

Genuinely curious where you land: is a visible adoption leaderboard a fair way to measure a team, or is it just a slower-motion version of the same cut?

 

Clip credit: 20VC with Harry Stebbings & Uber. DM for credit or removal requests.

 

The leaderboard measures usage. It doesn't measure ownership — and the difference between those two is the actual thing I built the working system around.

“你在帮人倒米吗？“

Lauren Tan didn't get replaced by her own tooling.

She got promoted by it — and nobody handed her that promotion.

She built the case for it herself, one lint rule and one CI gate at a time, until the argument was undeniable.

That's the part nobody's really talking about when they talk about AI and engineering jobs: the shift rewards the people who go looking for the leverage first, not the people who wait to be told it's safe to look.

 

That "build the case yourself" instinct is exactly what clicked for me watching my own son learn to run a team instead of carry it.

My son started playing 王者荣耀 (Honor of Kings) since he was a teenager — a 5v5 multiplayer battle arena game where you manage a roster of specialized heroes, growing and levelling up their strengths through battles and gear.

In his early gaming days I could hear him cursing and swearing from his room — bad coordination, worst teammates. There was a phrase we used for a bad teammate in my own career — 帮人倒米*, a Cantonese idiom that literally translates as helping someone tip over their own grain container, meaning ruining or sabotaging someone's livelihood.*

But the cursing became less and less. He got good at managing his heroes and coordinating with his team. He started climbing the leaderboard. People started noticing him and his team. Then, in college, he started getting invited to tournaments — cash prizes when he won, and one lagged-connection loss at a KL tournament he still suspects was foul play.

Time has changed — my dad would've killed me for wasting my teenage years on video games.

Now he's in university, still playing, still winning tournaments and cash prizes with his team.

Why I'm bringing this up: I always thought these AI agents are kind of like the heroes my son uses in the game. Your skill is in your managing these heros and how to grow them, level them up to serve your purpose. You don't go down to the battle yourself. You engage the heros to do it for you.

The skill is in the managing.

https://preview.redd.it/xiee128173kh1.jpg?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=638e2d62448f1e60434b937b5a21ea332501c595

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I keep walking into the same room wearing a different name on the door — the accountant's room, the analyst's room, now the engineer's.

Every time, someone's being told the machine is coming for their hours, not their name on the work.

 

Drop your take — are you already the head chef of your own stack, or are you still doing all the cooking yourself?

 

Clip credit: MTS (Monitor The Situation) — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

 

If encoding your own judgment into the system sounds like the actual leverage skill here, the mechanism I built around exactly this is one link away.

Bloomberg's own reporting already answers the question this clip raises — is the "messy middle" projected or already happening?

At Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Microsoft, Uber, and Hyatt, it's already happened: sizable call-center headcount cut using automated phone and chat systems, savings already banked.

Economist Molly Kinder's point isn't a forecast.

It's a line item that's already closed.

 

I've watched this exact math play out before superior technology ever touched a keyboard.

Suncon was getting jobs overseas. One of the countries we went to was India. We were building infrastructure — roads and bridges there. I didn't go. But my seniors went stationed there. When they came back during their scheduled holidays, one of them, a project manager, told me this story.

It so happened, that building roads and bridges inland means clearing jungles and passing through villages. As they were doing it, of course they engaged local villagers to be their workers and supervisors. Well, of course building infrastructure means bringing in heavy machineries, such as excavators, bobcats, mobile-cranes, 4-wheel-drive land-cruisers, etc. You know — the usual.

But the local villagers weren't happy. They complained that all these machineries have deprived the local population of their means of making a living. They have so many mouths to feed. A lot of them are quite poor. And many of them are very hunger for work.

And so a huge argument broke out. They even spitefully challenged our project team that they vast manpower was more superior than our machinery. I was so surprised when I heard it. How can they say that? How was that even a reasonable challenge, you know. My curiosity had the best of me.

Well, the project manager came up with an idea. He said, since they're so confident of their manpower, why don't we have a competition. Let's do a challenge of moving earth from point A to point B for our excavator/mobile-crane operator versus their vast manpower.

And they accepted.

At the day of challenge, the project manager set up two huge piles of earth at point A for both teams. The local villagers' team had their "vast" manpower formed a long-ass line between A and B, and started moving earth, with their primitive buckets and whatnot.

For our team, we set up our mobile-cranes, excavators and bobcats on strategic locations. And off we go.

You can guess the result. We won by a large margin. We were obviously much faster and better at it.

After that, the local villagers concede defeat.

The math is actually quite similar here. The one with superior technology always wins. This AI-take over is no different.

https://preview.redd.it/ntbpt4qenqjh1.jpg?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=cea883ec3b203b4c87a315d4edcf410b183609c8

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Every time I dig into one of these stories the shape repeats: the tool doesn't ask permission, it just wins the argument by moving faster than the objection can be raised.

 

Ever watched something you thought was irreplaceable lose, and lose fast? Drop your take below.

 

Clip credit: Center for Humane Technology — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

 

If you want to see how I'm actually building leverage against this instead of just watching it happen, it's just one link away

Watching a former Tesla AI Director shrug and say "I can't tell if that's temporary, I'm not sure how I feel about it yet" did something to me.

Usually it's the junior guy admitting that.

Not the guy who helped build the thing.

 

The people who end up fine here aren't the loudest about how safe their job is.

They're just already standing close enough to the mechanism to redirect it, instead of getting redirected by it.

 

Karpathy's actual point isn't doom.

It's the Jevons paradox — code gets cheaper, so total demand for it goes up.

Just not for the same kind of engineer who got hired in 2019.

 

>I watched a version of this play out years ago, before any of this AI stuff existed. I was the technical guy in a construction tender department. Rule-based work — you follow A, you get B. A sub-contractor came in to pitch his quotation. On his way out, in the corridor, we locked eyes and instantly recognized each other. I knew him — my senior once told me how this guy forced his way into building an illegal bungalow, moving the boundary survey line onto his neighbour's land. I caught a flicker of panic on his face. He wasn't expecting to see me there.

>I couldn't keep it to myself. I walked straight to my contract department and told them. They wrote him off after their own investigation.

Our technical and contractual work was rule-based — AI eats that easily. What I did with that information wasn't. Insider judgment, only humans have.

 

The same judgment call that got that guy written off is the exact thing I eventually turned into my own way of getting paid for the part AI can't touch — not complicated, once you actually go looking for it.

 

Clip credit: No Priors — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

 

What would you have done in that corridor?

Drop your take. 👇

Every one of these clips lands the same blow eventually: a role someone spent years building gets quietly outperformed by a system that never clocks out.

 

Kavak sells used cars across Latin America — a genuinely messy transaction: ~20,000 SKUs to choose from, then financing, insurance, and a trade-in valuation stacked on top.

Historically, closing one sale meant routing a customer through 15 separate human specialists across 15 different teams, each holding one piece of the process.

 

Alejandro Maza Ayala, Kavak's Chief Product & AI Officer, explained on a16z's show how they fixed it — not by making a support bot, but by building a single "mega-expert" agent that holds all 15 specialties at once (financing, insurance, trade-in, advisory) and puts that one agent in front of the customer.

 

The result: 2.1x the conversion rate of their own human sales team, tripled customer satisfaction.

The agent never tires, never forgets a customer's history, and when it makes a mistake, the correction propagates to the other 200,000 agents in the fleet by the next morning — a scale of self-correction no individual human career can match working alone.

 

It closes on Alejandro flatly stating that the industry assumption — "customers aren't going to want to buy expensive things from AI" — is wrong, and Kavak's numbers are the proof.

 

When I read the transcript, it felt so eerily similar to the Borg Collective Mind in Star Trek.

That's the ultimate evolution.

The question we need to ask is, will it serve us, or subjugate us?

 

If your role is the coordination layer between departments — the person routing a customer between financing, insurance, and everyone else — that's precisely the layer this consolidates first.

Worth sitting with, not scrolling past.

 

Clip credit: a16z — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

 

Drop your take below.

 

The actual build-vs-be-built-around decision doesn't happen in the comments section — it's just one link away.

Built this using Claude. Eeach one has a distinct role (CEO, Creative Director, QA, Marketer). They communicate, make decisions, and ship games autonomously. Happy to answer questions on the architecture, setup, workflows or anything else!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQzNrmIBzvY

Another data point for the argument in Mastery is Dead: the production layer of expert work is compressing, and the people inside these careers are absorbing the change slower than the market is repricing it.

Source (CNBC): https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/08/ai-and-job-losses-how-the-next-automation-wave-will-impact-the-workforce.html

Which side of the line does this land on — the production work that's being automated, or the judgment work that (for now) isn't? If this is your field, what are you actually seeing on the ground?