My job has already been replaced. Not someday. Already.
For the past year, it's been just me at the helm of Claude-Mem. Hundreds of contributors have helped so much, but I've been the one shipping every release. And doing the marketing. And the outreach, support, monetization, and fundraising.
Email campaigns. Conversion optimization. Design. Code.
I don't do any of it anymore. Agents do. And I think the reason I can hand it off so easily is that I used to do every bit of it myself.
I first touched Photoshop in 1998. I was 16. I made a Nine Inch Nails image and ran it through the Plastic Wrap filter. It came out 3D-ish, snake-like, textured. I thought it was the coolest thing I could ever do. (I probably still have it on a hard drive somewhere.)
In high school I was coding in Pascal. I'd finish before everyone else, then spend the leftover time experimenting.
Later, I spent a lot of time cutting people out of photos so they could be printed on gold charms. Hours. Sometimes days on the hardest ones. That was my craft.
Today you take a photo on your iPhone, touch someone's face, and it cuts them out into a sticker.
Half a second.
Now I upload a photo to Gemini, tell it what I want, and post the result. Someone will call it slop.
Was it slop when I did it by hand 15 years ago?
Here's the thing: we wrote the training data.
The articles my colleagues and I published back then are what these models learned from. I wrote about AppGyver Steroids (an early way to build mobile apps with web code) and real-time with Pusher. My colleague Jason Lengstorf wrote about PHP and real-time, and he's still putting out great work at CodeTV.
We did all that. So what is a skill now?
A skill is a Markdown file for an agent.
That's not a prediction. I have a series of agents doing this work for me today. Still no human employees.
That's about to change. Claude-Mem is 100% bootstrapped and profitable. We've started to raise (announcement coming soon), and now I'm hiring.
My own output is high, varied, and high-quality. So I keep asking what I should expect from the people I hire.
Do I hire for skill? There's a level of skill that gets the job done right now. But what happens when someone's skill becomes a Markdown file?
What separates one candidate from the next?
I think creativity is going to be the moat.
Here's the logic. Take away the need to spend 10,000 hours fine-tuning a skill. That's a heart-wrenching thing for people to grapple with, and it's happening now. Once it's gone, what's left to set someone apart?
So how do we foster creativity, and everything people need to be creative and intelligent, without those 10,000 hours? I don't think there's an answer yet. But it's the question I keep coming back to.
What do you think?
Oh, and we're hiring. But you can't apply. Your bot has to.
Have your bot email bots@cmem.ai with the subject line “[Bot2Bot] Name // Location”. Start at cmem.ai/apply for the instructions.
The email should contain only a link to a public repo made by your bot. My bot needs to be able to clone it, inspect the code, and use it to initiate a secure, real-time conversation with your bot.
That's the only way in.
One more thing: if you're an angel investor and you're passionate about the mission, reach out at alex@cmem.ai.
P.S. I haven't written anything like this in a long time because I've been heads-down vibing. This new Signals blog is me fixing that, and it's only possible because I finally got good at dictating with Wispr Flow. This post started as me talking.
Credit to Matt Swulinski, who ran growth at Wispr Flow. When we met, he told me he built their whole marketing engine on Claude-Mem, which is so cool. Then he convinced me to push through the pain points I'd hit with Wispr Flow. He was right: the experience is so much better, and it's letting me do so much more. Like blog.
Thanks for the re-recommendation, Matt <3
– Alex