Nate B Jones makes a useful point in this video: AI is not coming for whole jobs in one clean move. It is quietly absorbing pieces inside jobs, the routine bits that were propping up the rest of the role. Your calendar can still look full, your manager can still be happy, and the economics underneath the role can be shifting anyway. He proposes a simple, private audit you can run on your own week to see where you actually stand. The rest of this post is that audit, distilled to the moves you can make this afternoon.
The Setup
Open the last 10 business days of your calendar. Then open your sent email, your Slack DMs, your docs, your tickets, your commits, whatever medium contains your actual work. Go item by item. Tag each individual item (the meeting, the memo, the update, the review) with one of four letters. Don't tag the role. Don't tag the project. Tag the unit of time.
The Four Tags
T, Theater. Work that exists because the organization performs it, not because it produces examined value. The status meeting where nothing changed. The deck nobody reads carefully. The recurring update that started 18 months ago because someone once asked. If the work disappeared and the only consequence was admitting it had been performance rather than production, it's theater.
C, Commodity. Real work that produces real value, but doesn't require you specifically. Summarizing, routing, applying known rules to known situations, turning a meeting into next steps, producing a first draft in a well-known shape. The test: could you write a spec and have someone else in your org produce roughly the same output? If yes, it's C. Not an insult (companies run on C work), but a signal about where your career should not be centered.
L, On the Line. The uncomfortable middle. Pattern recognition where the patterns are structured. Editorial calibration in an established format. Synthesis across familiar inputs. Work where a strong junior could do 70% of it and the last 30% feels like yours, but you'd struggle to articulate exactly what judgment you applied. If you find yourself agonizing over an item, tag it L and move on.
D, Durable. Work where the output depends on something you cannot fully describe in advance. You changed the question more than you answered it. You read the room and saw the stated problem wasn't the real problem. Your presence visibly changed the outcome in a way that goes beyond competence or speed. D is not just hard work. Some hard work is commodity work. D is the work that would have degraded without you specifically there.
Tag quickly. First instinct. When you're done, count it up. Theater plus commodity is the fraction of your current week that is on thin ice.
What To Do After The Count
- Stop performing the theater you can stop without consequences. Don't pick the hardest political fight first. Cancel the meeting where you're the third senior person and the second is enough. Trim the recurring report into three Slack sentences. Watch what happens. Most of the time, nothing happens. That's the point.
- Don't pour recovered time back into more commodity work. The trap: AI helps you write updates faster, so you write more updates. You become twice as productive at the part of your job whose value is collapsing. Put the recovered hours into cases where the framing is unclear, not just the execution.
- Keep a private record of durability calls. At the end of every week, write down one call you made where the outcome depended on judgment you cannot reduce to rules. The context, the call, the result (or the date you'll know the result). After a year you have around 50 entries. After three you have a portfolio of judgment instead of half-remembered claims.
- Use that record to gradually refuse commodity work that doesn't fit your trajectory. You can't simply announce that you don't do routine work anymore. Become visibly valuable on non-routine work first, then renegotiate the routine load, often through project selection before formal authority. When you have a choice, take the project where the answer is uncertain over the one where the path is documented.
- Make your durable work partially legible. Talk about outcomes: "I was concerned we were solving the wrong problem and I got us to have that conversation. We changed the plan." That tells the system where you contribute outside commoditized work without turning your judgment into a recipe anyone can run. Separate analysis (transferable) from judgment (yours) in how you describe what you did.
- If the role itself doesn't have enough durable work to grow into, consider moving. Some roles are theater-heavy because the org is. Some are commodity-heavy because they were designed for an earlier era. When evaluating a new role, don't read the job description. Ask the people doing it what they spent last week on, where the ambiguous questions live, and what calls they made that couldn't have been made by a process. If they can't answer in specifics, be careful.
The Point
The choice is not whether to learn the AI tools. You're going to need to learn them anyway. That's table stakes now, not a differentiator. The real choice is what you invest in with the time and attention those tools give you back. You can pour it into more of the work whose value is collapsing, and feel productive for a while because the old systems still reward visible throughput. Or you can start now, this week, moving your hours toward the work that still requires a person. The audit isn't a verdict. It's a starting point. The advantage goes to whoever can update their own picture before the organization updates it for them.
Credit and full reasoning: Nate B Jones, the original video and the accompanying Substack write-up.