Stop being a tile

Output is getting cheap - you don't have to

Meta just let 8,000 people go. You probably saw it. It’s hard not to. Every week now there’s a new number, a new logo, a new round.

I run a studio. We use AI every day. It makes us faster and better and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. And still, most mornings I open my phone and feel a bit sick.

Not because of the tools. Because of the people on the other side of them. Designers, writers, engineers. Good ones. Posting into the void, wondering what they’re for now.

I don’t have a clean answer. I want to say that up front. I’m not the guy on stage telling you it’s all fine if you just learn to prompt. I’m confused too. Some days I’m thrilled. Some days it just hurts.

But I keep coming back to one thing.

We already ran this experiment. Six years ago, we all went remote and got reduced to a tile on a screen. Same box, same size, muted until it was our turn. The lesson wasn’t that remote is bad. It was what happens when all you are is the box and the file inside it.

When you’re only the thing you hand over, you are a thing. Swappable. Comparable. Rankable.

That’s what AI does to the deliverable. It turns the output into a tile. Cheap, fast, and good enough to fool you. That’s the dangerous part. It’s not bad work. It’s convincing work, done in seconds, for free, all night, without complaining. If your whole worth is the file you hand over, that’s who you’re up against now.

So the question stops being “what can I make.” Everyone can make now.

It becomes “who actually wants me around.”

That’s the part the machine can’t touch. It can write the email. It can’t be the person your client phones at 11pm when the launch is on fire. It can draft the strategy. It can’t read someone’s face and see they’re scared and need a different conversation than the one they asked for. It can be trusted to generate. It can’t be trusted. It can’t be on the hook. It can’t care, and people feel the difference.

So here’s what I believe. The skill now is relationships. Not as a soft add-on to the real work. As the real work.

We’re going back to something old. The thing that mattered most fifty years ago. Knowing people. Being able to make someone trust you. For a few decades we hid behind output, because it was scarce and slow. That window is closing.

You’ll still produce. Of course. But you’ll produce less and less. The value moves to who knows you, and what they know you for.

Not “I deliver logos” or “I write code.” A point of view. A name that walks into the room before you do. People who trust you, who get you, who feel you get them. That’s the asset now.

And it doesn’t switch on the day you need it. You can’t download trust. You can’t buy back ten years of being someone people believe in. It builds slowly, by showing up. So the people grinding output right now, staying invisible to stay efficient, are spending the one thing that’s about to matter most.

I think about my kid, ten years old. What I want him to double down on isn’t a skill a machine will flatten in five years. School won’t teach it to him either. It’s the stuff that happens at playtime. The friendships. The reading of people. The talking. Kids spend most of the day sitting quiet in a classroom, when the real learning is out in the playground. We had it backwards the whole time.

So if I have anything useful to offer, it’s small.

Look at how you describe yourself. How you behave. How you communicate. Don’t stay quiet. Don’t be just the outcome. Be the person who sells the outcome.

Then ask the harder one: who would take my call, vouch for me, back me on instinct? And what have I done for that list this month?

If the answer is nothing, that’s the work now. Not more output. That.

I won’t pretend there’s room for everyone in this. There isn’t, and saying otherwise would be a lie. But the people who come through it find something better than a job. They get to be useful to real people, and known for who they are, not what they make.

That’s where the purpose is, on the other side of all this. Not in out-producing the robots. In the part they were never going to want anyway.

We’re all in this one together. That part I’m sure about.

Love. Stef.