The line

Something strange is happening to employees right now, and most of them don't see it yet.

Every person at every company is about to end up on one side of a line. On one side: people who are core to the business. The product breaks without them, customers leave without them, revenue stops without them. On the other side: everyone else.

If you're on the first side, you're a partner being paid like an employee. If you're on the second side, AI replaces you. Not in five years. Now.

The middle is disappearing. And that's what I want to write about.

The Partner Problem

There's a pattern I keep seeing. A PM at a SaaS company runs the entire product. She talks to customers, defines the roadmap, writes specs, coordinates engineering, ships features. The product wouldn't exist without her.

She makes $160K. The company does $8M in revenue. She captures 2% of the value she creates.

She knows this. Everyone in her position knows this. But the golden handcuffs are real. Salary, benefits, equity that vests over four years, the comfort of someone else handling payroll and insurance and office space. So she stays. And every year the gap between what she creates and what she captures gets wider.

This person doesn't need a promotion. She doesn't need a raise. She needs to be a partner. Either where she is, with real equity and real ownership, or somewhere else entirely.

The problem is that until recently, "somewhere else" meant building a company the old way. Hiring people. Raising money. Managing a team. All the stuff that has nothing to do with the product work she's actually great at.

That equation just changed completely.

The Replacement

Now the other side. If you're honest with yourself and the answer is "I'm not core," this isn't an insult. It's information.

Most non-core work is execution. Taking decisions someone else made and implementing them. Writing the content. Running the campaigns. Answering the tickets. Compiling the reports.

AI does all of this now. Not in theory. Not eventually. Today. And it does it faster, cheaper, and increasingly better than a human doing the same repetitive work.

This doesn't mean you're worthless. It means your current role is. There's a difference, and it matters.

The people who survive this shift aren't the ones who learn to "use AI tools" at their current job. That just makes you a more efficient version of a role that's disappearing. The people who survive are the ones who find a problem they're uniquely positioned to solve and build around it.

Not "learn to prompt better." Find a problem. Become core to something.

Two Moves

So there are really only two positions worth being in.

Core to an existing business, as a partner. If you're the reason the product works, the reason customers stay, the reason revenue grows, you should own a piece of it. Not 0.1% in options that vest over four years. Real ownership. Partner-level.

Go to your founder and make the case. If they say no, that tells you everything you need to know about how they value your contribution.

Core to a new business, as a founder. If your company won't make you a partner, or if you're in a non-core role and you can see the writing on the wall, the move is to start something where you are core.

Starting a company used to be terrifying. It meant hiring, fundraising, managing people, burning through savings. It meant doing all the things that have nothing to do with the actual problem you want to solve.

That's not what it means anymore.

The Structural Shift

AI didn't just automate tasks. It eliminated the reason most companies need employees.

Think about what a typical startup team does. Marketing: AI handles content, distribution, targeting. Customer support: AI handles 80% of tickets better than a human. Research: AI synthesizes information faster than any analyst. Operations: AI manages workflows, scheduling, reporting. Onboarding: AI guides new users through activation.

What's left? The person who understands customers better than they understand themselves. The person who knows what needs to be built.

That's you. If you're core, that's literally what you already do. You just do it inside someone else's company, under someone else's cap table, building someone else's vision.

A company used to require 10 to 15 people to get off the ground. Now it requires one person who's core and AI handling everything else. The cost went from $50K and six months to a few hundred dollars and a few weeks.

That's not a small change. That's a structural shift in who gets to be a founder.

The Dangerous Middle

There's a third group I haven't mentioned. People who aren't sure if they're core or not.

Here's a rough test: if you have to think about it for more than ten seconds, you're probably not. Core people know. They know because the product breaks when they go on vacation. They know because their work is the reason customers pay.

If you're in the middle, you do good work, you're smart, you add value, but you're not the reason the business exists. And that's the most dangerous position to be in. You're too expensive to keep once AI can do 80% of your job, but you're too comfortable to leave on your own.

The middle is where most layoffs come from. Not because companies are cruel, but because AI makes the math obvious. Why pay $120K for someone who's "helpful" when AI does the same work for $200/month?

The way out of the middle is to move toward core. Either find the thing at your current company that only you can do and make yourself indispensable, or find a problem outside your company where you'd be the core person from day one.

What People Miss

Here's the thing most people get wrong about this moment. They see it as a threat. For people with real skills, people who build, who design, who understand customers, who solve hard problems, this is the biggest opportunity in decades.

The gatekeepers are gone. You don't need VC money to start. You don't need a co-founder who "handles the business side." You don't need to hire a marketing team or a support team or an ops team.

You need a problem worth solving, the skills to build the solution, and AI handling everything else.

Every PM who's ever thought "I could build a better version of this product" can actually do it now. Every developer who's had a side project that never launched because "I don't know marketing" can let AI do the marketing. Every designer who's seen a terrible product succeed because it had better distribution can let AI handle distribution.

The dream was always to own what you build. To capture the value you create. To work on problems that matter to you, not problems assigned to you.

That dream used to require permission. Funding. A team. A safety net.

Now it requires a decision.

What I've Seen

I run multiple companies with zero employees. Not as an experiment, as the model. Five products shipped last month. AI handles marketing, onboarding, research, support, and operations across all of them.

The tools exist. They work. They're not perfect, but they're better than a junior hire and they cost a fraction of the price.

The people who move first get the biggest advantage. Not because of artificial scarcity, but because the market hasn't caught up yet. In two years, everyone will be building this way. Right now, most people are still asking for permission.

If you're core, become a partner or become a founder. If you're not core, become core to something. Fast.

The middle is disappearing. The question isn't whether this shift is happening. It's which side of it you end up on.