The only reason you should be scared of the AI layoffs
What to do if you feel overwhelmed
The AI layoffs keep coming. Coinbase 3 days ago, and now Cloudflare. Very soon, every single tech company will have one.
And who knows if your company will be next.
It’s frustrating that your job has never felt so unsafe. At any moment, your employer could pull the plug and decide to go all in on AI.
And that leaves you with the unhappy process of finding yet another job, in a market where most employers are questioning why they should hire someone else instead of just using AI.
But, I don’t think this will happen to most of you, unless you fall into this group:
The mindless task executors are unsafe
I got laid off in Feb. At first, I felt that it was unfair.
But then, I finally understood why I was no longer valuable to my company:
I was excellent at following orders, but had zero agency. I was too afraid of making mistakes, and I became an executor, rather than a strategist.
As a marketer, I followed whatever that my manager planned to do. Write this article, create this graphic. And whenever I was asked to give ideas, I had none.
Because I was too scared that my ideas sounded stupid.
Since AI could do my job better, faster, and cheaper, it made sense why my employer would swap out my salary for a $100/month Claude plan.
For those who fall in the same category as me (a mindless task executor):
There could be a higher chance that AI replaces you.
AI is excellent as an execution engine. So long as you give it the direction, the expected output, and a clear workflow:
It will do that task almost to perfection.
And those who survive the next wave of layoffs are those who possess this skill:
Being AI-native starts with mastering Skills
Everyone talks about the high-income skills that you need to survive the AI era.
To me, the only one that you should focus on is building good Skills:
These are repeatable SOPs that you give to Claude, ChatGPT, or any other LLM, and they execute them according to that workflow.
Skills are the most effective when they tell LLMs to execute tasks that you hated doing every single day:
Searching old docs and chat messages to find something that your teammate said previously
Filling in claim forms manually for your claimable expenses
Formatting reports so they look presentable
When employers want you to be AI-native, it’s not about how many vibe-coded projects you can produce every week.
Instead, it’s finding ways to integrate AI into your workflows:
What steps can be automated by AI, while which ones should a human still do?
When you free up your time and cognitive load by outsourcing the right tasks to AI, you become more valuable to your employer.
So if there was only one skill that I would master now, it would be to build Effective Skills with the SIGNAL Framework:
S: Spot the bottleneck
I: Integrate the stack
G: Guide the LLM
N: Nail the standard
A: Automate the logic
L: Loop recursively
So long as you can describe the problem and bottleneck in plain English, you can build a Skill without any coding experience.
You decide on the ‘what’, while AI finds the ‘how’ to execute it.
Become AI-native in less time by learning this skill
Building good Skills will be something that your employers will value, especially when it saves them time on the soul-sucking, boring tasks that you and they hate doing.
And after spending the past 4 months learning how to get good at AI, I perfected the SIGNAL framework to build any Skill to automate my work, instead of relying on another automation platform like n8n.
This is what I’ll be sharing more of in The AI-Native Sprint, a 90-minute crash course that gives you a clear path to becoming AI-Native for busy 9-to-5 professionals.
If you’d like to join us, sign up for the waitlist here: