Less than an hour ago, Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 4.6. The pace of acceleration is frightening, and if you still don't know what that means for your life, this is the article.
I'm 20 years old and I'm watching jobs evaporate in real time and I can't stay silent. I'm lucky that I'm deep enough in this space to understand what to look out for, and that's exactly why I'm writing this. I want to share everything and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous. But the nerves sit underneath something much louder, which is excitement, because what I'm also watching is what becomes possible for ordinary people when these tools are in their hands.
Things that used to require a team, a budget, and two years can now be done by one person with a laptop and a clear idea of what they want to build in a matter of hours, and that is not an exaggeration. The million dollar question is not whether this technology is going to affect your life, because the short answer is it already is. Instead, the question is whether you're going to be someone who uses it or someone it happens to.
First, understand what you're actually dealing with
Most people who have tried AI used it once, asked it something like they would Google, got a mediocre answer, and moved on. That experience is real but it's also completely misleading about what these tools are capable of.
The way to think about modern AI is not as a search engine. It's closer to having an extremely capable person sitting next to you who has read almost everything ever written, can write in any style, can analyze any document you put in front of it, can write and debug code, can help you think through a business decision, can draft a contract, can build a financial model, and will not get tired or distracted. That person is available to you right now for only $20 a month. All you have to do is start out. A prompt I like to suggest to people at the start is: I am x, this is what I know *insert information* and I want to learn more about AI. Assuming *enter previous knowledge* what's the best place to start and why?
The why is a lot more important than people might think, as it gives AI additional context to understand reasoning, which is the most fundamental and life changing part about all of AI. Give it the why all the time.
Start with your own time
The first place to apply this is the part of your week that drains the most time for the least return. This is usually stuff like admin, checking emails, some form of summarizing information. Pick one of those and this week, before you do it the way you normally would, describe what you need to Claude or ChatGPT and give it every relevant detail. Again, remember reason so that it can understand how to do its job better and help you. AI is designed to assist you in your work.
If you spend two hours every Monday writing a weekly update for your team, paste in your notes and tell the AI what the update needs to cover, who the audience is, what tone you want and other details you want to add and just see what it produces. It's not going to be perfect, but if you refine it, instead of writing the whole thing, you are guaranteed to get your time back. Then find the next thing. Then the next. This change doesn't happen instantaneously as you might see on the internet, because it usually leads to burnout. I've experienced it and I'm sure you have too. The change should be gradual and you should start relying on this technology piece by piece, not all at once. Spend your actual cognitive energy on the things only you can do.
You have to note that while you want to build this habit gradually, this compounds fast. People who have been doing this consistently for six months are operating with what feels like an extra day in their week, and if that's not you yet, that will be you soon.
Build something, the bigger the better
The same technology that is compressing certain roles is also making it cheaper and faster than ever to build something of your own. You've probably heard the phrase "an idea guy is worth $10b+" and now with OpenAI's acquisition of OpenClaw that has never been closer to the truth than now. An idea you've been sitting on for two years because you didn't have the technical skills or the money to hire someone can now be a working prototype in an afternoon, which you can explore further.
If you're not familiar with the technology, you can use tools like Lovable, cursor, claude code, or any other tools you may find where you describe what you want to build, the AI writes it, you test it, you tell it what to change, and it changes it. The barrier to building real things is lower than it has ever been in history.
Contrary to many people's beliefs, I would not advise you to start small. I would actually say start massive. Try and find seemingly the most impossible problem you may find, and go after it with the use of AI. The reason behind this is you want to see the ceiling, not the floor. You want to develop a habit of understanding the capabilities of AI and you can't calibrate your opinion properly if you assess it based on a calendar note taking app and not some visual representation of some of the most complex formulas that you use in your day to day life. Just a couple of days ago I saw a guy painting through the use of formulas, and AI helped him build out the project. Do more of that.
Build a personal brand around what you're learning
As you start using these tools seriously, document what you're figuring out and share it with the world. Fortunately (or not) people simply don't care about you. Partially why I write these articles, to try and give back to the world my learnings, even though nobody knows me. Write about what worked for you and what didn't work for you, and talk about how you can help other people. Post the thing you built. Talk about the hour you saved and exactly how you saved it. Do whatever it takes to share your learnings on the internet.
You don't need to be a content creator with millions of followers to do this. Everyone started at 0 when they were starting out. You just need to be one step ahead of someone else and willing to share what you learned. The people who built audiences in this space over the last two years did it by being useful and honest, not by being the smartest person in the room.
In today's digital-first world, a personal brand is this amplifying speaker that makes your portfolio compound. And you don't even have to post about tech. You can post your niche learnings from your work, your living situation, your raw story of your upbringing, but the goal is to make people care. Because once people care, they will become your supporters. And once you have supporters, every post becomes a signal to future employers, clients, collaborators, and opportunities that you understand where things are going. In a world where AI is compressing the value of generic skills, being a known person with a specific point of view is one of the most durable advantages you can build.
The honest version of what's happening
Entry level roles in writing, research, basic analysis, customer support, and parts of software development are disappearing as you're reading this article. I watch this happen in real time because I'm in the industry where it started and also I'm still in college. I have a tonne of friends who are graduating and moving back into their parent's houses because they can't seem to find jobs anywhere.
The same force that's compressing those roles is expanding what's possible for people who engage with it seriously. Please learn how to use this technology, and use it well, because the person who learns to use these tools well is not competing with AI, but using it as leverage to do work that would have previously required a team. That person becomes significantly more valuable, not less.
The window to be early is open right now, but not for very long. A 24 hour period in the world of AI and agents is probably around 72-100 hours in the real world for humans, if not more. If you've read to this point, I want you to go, buy a paid subscription plan to either ChatGPT or Claude and use it. Ask ChatGPT to build you something, encourage it to challenge your ideas and beliefs, ask it what other people have built in the real world and post all your learnings and experiences.
You don't need to have it figured out, and frankly I don't have it fully figured out either. But I'm moving, and that's what matters right now. The longer you stay stationary, the faster the train will move away from you. Start today. The release that dropped an hour ago is already being used by someone who's building something. That someone can be you.