We all have been hearing things, reading articles, going through AI slop on Instagram and YouTube, all with one takeaway — it’s coming. You will lose your job. Let’s go back to farming. Those Jensen Huang memes are teasing you to give up and learn plumbing or repairing ACs.
I don’t write much here (something I am trying to change). In that quest, I was exploring the ‘where.’
LinkedIn? X? Substack? Everybody has a Substack nowadays. LinkedIn has become a ‘palika bazaar’ of hot takes. I wanted something of my own, where I own the data, and I control the UX. So I dug up my old WordPress blog. And why not.. I have been using WordPress since 2012. I self-host it on a cloud server on Hostinger. The data sits on Hostinger’s server, but I control it, and I control how it looks and is presented.
Usual stuff done – updating the core, updating plugins and themes. Now I was staring at a blog with half-cooked articles, the default WordPress theme, and an old Google Analytics integration. I wanted something simple, clean, and easily readable. Inspired by the Instapaper UI, I decided to give it a go.
I have not written a line of code for ages. I was not that good at it. I have some understanding, but not so much that I can redo the UI/UX. Long story short, I built the entire child theme on the default theme Twenty Five with Claude Cowork in like a day and that too because Claude hit the limit thrice during the whole process, otherwise I would have done it in under an hour. I don’t know how I feel about it.
For the longest of the time, the gossip corridor was buzzing with tech folks minting money because the translation had leverage. Not many people understood it, hence it was scarce. When I was working with STAGE, the post-lunch break gossip was around life and salary. People in our tech team were the highest paid (even more than the founders). Tech > Product > Marketing > Sales > Content > Customer Support. This is the typical hierarchy at any startup or MSME in India. Engineers with their more-expensive laptops, dual monitors, and everyone else with their aspiration and feeling of being a second-class citizen.
But then something happened in Feb 2023, OpenAI launched the paid version of ChatGPT. Posts on Reddit and X said that it’s a difference of day and night; the outputs were 10x better than the free version. We were discussing how we can use it to be more productive at work, and someone suggested that we take the subscription. They were rolling it in phases. The plus version was not open for public. As luck would have it, I got an invite two weeks after the launch and took the subscription. Vinay bhaiya, being Vinay bhaiya, said that we will reimburse you for it, and the whole company can use it and play around.
For the next 8-9 months, I saw people testing it out, some used it for code, some did research, and a few asked it to write copies and make marketing plans. This was a shared account because the access was being rolled out in phases. Towards the end of my time at STAGE (left in Jan 2024), the sentiment was “Oh yeah, monkey intelligence.”
We’re in March 2026, and that trend, not just in that subset but overall, has gone > “Oh yeah, monkey intelligence,” > “Hmm.. good stuff,” > “Oh fuck!”
The impact, you may ask.
These weren’t routine job cuts. They reflected a deeper structural shift in India’s outsourcing model, shaped by pandemic-era overhiring and investor pressure toward AI-led delivery.
And it’s not that these companies are not growing. The CXOs are making more than ever. It’s just that the lower end of the food chain has run its course.
Imagine you graduated from a tier-2 engineering college in a small town in India. You were dealt a bad hand at the cosmic lottery of life. Access was limited. Resources were limited. But somehow, you got some velocity to escape out of it and maybe lift your entire family out of the muck. But before you could pull, someone cut the rope.
Marketing sold a fear to our parents’ generation. Hopium. Mostly driven by the success stories of the diaspora in the West. The promise was that if you study hard, obey the rules, and be the aadarsh baalak, you will get out of it. The achievement was that you could get out of this country. Fear makes you do things. That’s why a generation of children was sent to the same factory where they learnt how to obey rules and be a good yesman. The result was an influx of linear thinkers.
And then what?
Now you may say that it’s for the betterment of the whole ecosystem. AI takes away jobs, but it will also create new jobs. And I would have agreed with you, but my first-hand conversations with folks in IT, software, and customer support say otherwise.
Rajeev Bajaj, Vice-Chairman – Bajaj Finance, said at their third quarter’s earnings call that AI has processed 20 million calls and disbursements stood at Rs 1,600 crore. These are small to medium-sized loans, mostly unsecured. The middle layer in the stack has completely disappeared. Give it six months, and it will go 10x or maybe 20x. Source: NDTV.
When everyone can build, the person who knows what to build becomes the most valuable person in the room?
Tools are plenty. Information is abundant, so much so that there is information paralysis. AI Slop is being pushed by platforms because every major tech company wants to train their model. When it’s a game of attention, the platform will incentivise the shiny object. Once the glitter falls, would you look for knowledge or would you look for wisdom? The latter, I guess.
And when that happens. Will the food chain of white-collar jobs reset?
Taste + Strategy > AI-augmented execution > Pure technical skill
We’d have to wait and watch, I guess. Or should we learn farming now?
The next time someone tells you tech makes the most money, ask them if they can write a sentence that makes someone feel something. That’s the new code.
