You don't know how to use AI You don't know how to use AI<br>May 29, 2026<br>It’s 2026, and we have AI agents that can produce entry-level work at a much lower cost than a human employee. And yet, most people don’t know how to work with AI or manage their agents.

At the same time, companies are desperate for high-leverage hires. ClickUp, let go 22% of their workers, and introduced new $1M salary bands to attract agentic-native humans. Wix, Webflow, Meta all did the same this week. They’re all flattening their org, and firing most entry-level and white-collar hires. And it’s not about saving money but about finding more money to spend on AI capabilities + on unique AI native talent.

In fact, in the “Intelligence Curse” blog from 2025, the authors outlined three ways companies will adapt to the AI intelligence:

Do nothing, out of inertia

Fire most entry-level and white-collar jobs, to maximize benefits

Freeze all hiring initiatives

Here’s the devastating part: The bold ones will try #2. Everyone else will be pressured to do it too.

So, the way we think about growth changes:

Company wants AI leverage = Company buys Intelligence + Company hires humans who can manage said intelligence

Exhibit A: The ClickUp layoff and the search for AI talent

Let’s look at what the CEO of ClickUp announced:

The motivations of it are very clear and can be summarized in three buckets:

Create a budget to fund AI infra + hire high-leverage talent

Attract the best agent-native talent on the market, faster ($1M salary bands)

Become the first company in their vertical who’s going to diabolically grow based on AI restructuring + enhanced productivity

Here are some highlighted quotes from the announcement with a bit of explanation:

QuoteWhyExplanation”..this wasn’t about cutting costs. We’re introducing $1 Million salary bands”Attract the best talentThey want to attract the best talent on the market, faster. Everyone who has done something relevant with AI today, is now actively following their open jobs”Nearly every company will make changes like these. The ones that do it proactively will define what comes next.”…”These roles will evolve. But waiting for that to happen naturally means falling behind now”…”Ironically, the people that automate their jobs with AI will always have a job.”They want to unlock the recipe for AI growth fasterNew types of builders, system managers and front-liners roles will be created, and ClickUp wants to tap those people first and make money for them. These people have high common sense and judgement, and understand that they need to manage agents and not bother in checking their work”I did it because the way to operate at the highest level of productivity is changing, and to win the future, ClickUp needs to change with it. ”Humans are no longer needed to review AI workHuman-in-the-loop is no longer needed for most white-collar jobs, as AI can achieve highly accurate work. For other more impactful jobs, they need humans who are AI-native.”The common narrative is that AI makes everyone more productive. It doesn’t.”AI is no longer just a toolAI can almost automatically achieve the work done by entry level or back-office workers. An AI agent can now be considered a colleague, and not a tool.<br>In this reality, you either get replaced by AI, or you become someone who manages AI.

But chances are you’re not good with AI

Most of you are using ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Perplexity, or some version of an AI tool at work.

But that does not automatically make you AI-native and it definitely doesn’t make you productive. If anything, it makes you less productive.

In a lot of cases, it just means you’re doing the same job with more tabs open . You ask ChatGPT for a draft, copy it into a doc, ask for a summary, paste it into Slack, maybe use another tool for research, then another one for editing.

You end up in “Brain Fry”, and you start to work more and achieve less.

Here’s what most of you think makes you AI-native:

“Knows how to prompt” - prompting is so easy today

“Comfortable with ChatGPT” - that’s cool, my mom too

“Uses AI tools daily” - what does this mean? can you prove you’re more productive?

And here’s what shows a good signal that you actually are:

You can show a running setup for your agents, Claude Code/Codex, your Cursor setup

You can show judgement in real-time on how you’d adjust a given AI output

You can name three things you stopped letting AI do and why

You have a list of skill.md files that your agents are running on (more on this below)

The underlying reasoning behind every signal above:

(1) You’ve spent a lot of time building skills for your agents

(2) You know what needs your input

(3) You know what to scale and when

Most people try too hard to fully remove themselves from the first step and end up disappointed with the results. Maybe..don’t be lazy?

So, how can you become better

You can wait for your company to build its central AI brain and hand you leverage. Or you can...