Swizec Teller - a geek with a hatswizec.com

Scaling Fast Book

What happens when your startup hits hypergrowth?

Scaling Fast cover
Learn more

Senior Mindset Book

Get promoted, earn a bigger salary, work for top companies

    "But if AI does it all, what's *my* job?"

    With all the AI stuff one day you feel useless, another day you feel top of the world with an army of agents building big things that used to take weeks.

    And then your brain melts trying to keep track of it all. You own too many domains, are always on-call, and if anyone wants anything you are the person to ask.

    Because who else? You built it, you own it, you run it, you never told anyone else how it works. You barely looked at it yourself.

    Welcome to the "mental load" thing feminists have been talking about for ~~years~~ decades. Managing the work is harder than being told what to do and executing.

    Now scale that up to a CEO: they have that context for hundreds of people and their agents.

    That's why we'll always have jobs. There are limits to how much a person can keep track of and do a responsibly good job of. At best you can round-robin between priorities but you can't truly multitask without delegating.

    AI is at the level of handing off tasks. It's not true delegation.

    You have more hands to do work, sure, but you still have to think and keep track and cary the mental load. You can’t hand it off and say "you own this".

    You can't do that with most humans either.

    That's always been my point with the Senior Mindset book stuff and being a true senior engineer – be the person who can take ownership of problems and domains. Those will always be in high demand.

    Your job is to take mental load off others' plates.

    Cheers,
    ~Swizec

    Published on May 9th, 2026 in Mindset, Productivity, Reader Questions

    Did you enjoy this article?

    Continue reading about "But if AI does it all, what's *my* job?"

    Semantically similar articles hand-picked by GPT-4

    Senior Mindset Book

    Get promoted, earn a bigger salary, work for top companies

    Learn more

    Have a burning question that you think I can answer? Hit me up on twitter and I'll do my best.

    Who am I and who do I help? I'm Swizec Teller and I turn coders into engineers with "Raw and honest from the heart!" writing. No bullshit. Real insights into the career and skills of a modern software engineer.

    Want to become a true senior engineer? Take ownership, have autonomy, and be a force multiplier on your team. The Senior Engineer Mindset ebook can help 👉 swizec.com/senior-mindset. These are the shifts in mindset that unlocked my career.

    Curious about Serverless and the modern backend? Check out Serverless Handbook, for frontend engineers 👉 ServerlessHandbook.dev

    Want to Stop copy pasting D3 examples and create data visualizations of your own? Learn how to build scalable dataviz React components your whole team can understand with React for Data Visualization

    Want to get my best emails on JavaScript, React, Serverless, Fullstack Web, or Indie Hacking? Check out swizec.com/collections

    Did someone amazing share this letter with you? Wonderful! You can sign up for my weekly letters for software engineers on their path to greatness, here: swizec.com/blog

    Want to brush up on your modern JavaScript syntax? Check out my interactive cheatsheet: es6cheatsheet.com

    By the way, just in case no one has told you it yet today: I love and appreciate you for who you are ❤️

    Created by Swizec with ❤️