Help Wanted: Nobody

Being a generalist used to be valuable because most people weren't. Most people specialized. They picked a lane and got good at one thing. Someone who could do five things adequately was rare. That was valuable.

The value wasn't just coordination. A generalist could code well enough to work with engineers effectively. Design well enough to see when something was solvable. Build financial models well enough to know what mattered to investors. They could see across everything, call bullshit, and jump in when needed.

But even the best generalist still needed a team.

Then AI changed the equation.

The Constraint That's Disappearing

I've watched this happen across my own companies.

At H1, we raised over $200M and hired 100+ people in three years. At Breadboard, we built something similar with far fewer people. Now I watch solo founders build in months what took my entire H1 team years.

Not every problem. Not every person. But we're getting closer.

Even the best generalist used to need help. You could see the whole system, call bullshit, guide the work. But you still needed people to execute at scale. A designer to mock up screens. A developer to write production code. An analyst to run models.

That constraint is disappearing.

Employment for young software developers has fallen sharply from its 2022 peak. Customer service roles show similar declines. Major firms have cut campus hiring significantly. Not because business is bad. Because they don't need the people.

Why This Time Is Different

Every technology shift creates panic about jobs. The internet created new jobs. Email marketers. SEO specialists. Social media managers. The iPhone brought app developers and mobile designers.

Previous technologies mostly made people faster. You could do more, but you still needed the same roles. The internet didn't remove marketers or designers or engineers. It multiplied them.

AI feels different. In some cases, it doesn't just speed work up. It removes steps entirely.

Tasks that once required coordination between several people can now be handled by one person—if they have good judgment and the right tools. Not everywhere. Not yet. But often enough that it changes how you think about building things.

The internet expanded what was possible. AI seems to be shrinking the minimum number of people required.

Who Wins, Who Loses

This creates two futures at once.

For people with judgment and drive, AI is removing the last gatekeeper. You don't need investors to fund a team. You don't need a technical co-founder. A talented designer in a country with no venture capital can build what used to require millions. An engineer without a network can ship alone.

But the value concentrates. When you needed ten people to build something, ten people split the value. When you need one, that one captures everything.

Companies that already exist will increase margins not by creating better products, but by maintaining output with fewer people. X cut roughly 80% of staff and continues to operate. The savings flow to ownership, not the workers who left.

The people who already own equity will capture more. Those in positions to deploy AI and reduce headcount keep the gains. Some talented individuals who couldn't break through traditional gatekeepers will build alone and win. But the vast majority who made a living executing tasks face displacement.

Analysts running models. Designers mocking up screens. Customer service reps handling support tickets. If one person with AI can do what used to require ten, what happens to the other nine?

What This Means

We're about to find out if society can function when value concentrates this heavily.

For all of human history, there was a natural limit to how much value one person could capture. Even the most capable person could only do so much alone. You needed specialists. That forced distribution of value.

Consider the wealthiest people today. Jeff Bezos owns roughly 9% of Amazon. Elon Musk owns about 13% of Tesla. These are multi-hundred-billion-dollar companies, yet 90% of Amazon's value and 87% of Tesla's value belongs to others—employees with equity, early investors, public shareholders. And both companies created hundreds of thousands of jobs that fed families and built communities.

That natural distribution happened because you couldn't build something massive alone. You needed people. Value spread because scale required it.

That constraint is disappearing.

Maybe new jobs emerge that we can't see yet.

Or maybe we're headed somewhere we've never been. A world where the gap between people who can see across domains and people who can't becomes unbridgeable. Where breadth matters more than depth. Where not needing specialists is the ultimate advantage.

The generalists who used to be valuable because they could work with anyone are becoming valuable because they don't need anyone.

This is both the biggest risk and the biggest opportunity in modern history. If you're waiting for someone to hire you, you're betting on a system that's disappearing. But if you have agency and learn to wield these tools, you can build what used to require millions in funding and years of hiring.

The constraint that forced value to distribute is gone. What you do with that matters.