Jobs are roles now

I recently crossed paths with Kent, a designer by trade. And as with any conversation these days, it steered immediately into AI adoption and our adaptation to it.

See Kent Situ: Embedding AI into Our Workflows

Designers and front-end devs are among the hardest-hit when it comes to AI impact. With tools like Nano Banana and multimodal models like Gemini 3, the only advantage humans have over machines is good taste.

With a toolset like this, what used to take weeks now takes an afternoon:

And if everyone has access to these (they do), that means we can’t just take the rest of the week off and hope that the competitors do the same. We either adapt or fall behind the rest. When I say competition, it’s other job candidates that will take the job you didn’t qualify for, and other SaaS businesses that will take your share of the pie if you don’t.

But if a design for a product takes a few afternoons instead of months, would it make more sense to hire a full-time designer, or a front-end dev with good taste? If setting up and maintaining CI is a part-time job, then do you need a dev-ops specialist?

With AI tools capable of teaching us faster, what used to take months to learn can be picked up in a couple of weeks. That means employers will lean towards hiring generalists and evaluate for their ability to learn. The best indicator for learning ability is general intelligence and a track record of a variety of roles. If a cover letter can be slopped into existence, it will be assumed to be slopped into existence.

Adaptation into the AI world is to solve problems, not to hand off to the next guy in line and say ‘thats not my job’. An employee will be responsible for multiple roles, roles that used to be jobs.

And no, unlike Kent, I did not use AI to help me write this.