--- image: "/images/notes/substitute-or-augment-accounting.jpg" title: "Substitute or Augment? It's All Accounting" date: 2025-08-31 url: "https://x.com/ccatalini/status/1962161198163714109" tags: ['ai-agi'] deck: "The entire story of AI and labor is about what we can — and can't — put a number on. Juniors get displaced first because their tasks are built to be measurable." tweetCount: 5 likes: 7 reposts: 2 --- Substitute or augment? [@joshgans](https://x.com/joshgans) has a sharp analysis. But if you zoom out, it's all just accounting. 🧮 The entire story is about what we can—and can't—put a number on. [x.com](https://x.com/joshgans/status/1961882877668315169) Why do juniors get displaced first? Their tasks are built to be measurable to management (and, it turns out, to software). You write checklists, define KPIs, make their output predictable and auditable. AI doesn’t dislike interns... it just loves numbers and columns. Seniors accelerate. They hand AI the measurable bits (first drafts, boilerplate, memos) and spend time on the parts we don’t meter well: what‑ifs, judgment, curation. Management calls it "leverage", economists call it complementarity. But how long does that edge last? The edge lasts until the measurement frontier moves. And it's always moving. Each new instrument moves it: stopwatches ➡️ KPIs ➡️ clickstreams ➡️ prompt logs. 🤖 Today's "unmeasurable craft" is just tomorrow's auditable process, logged and quantified. The frontier of AI isn't just better code, it's the relentless push to codify and create metrics for the judgment and intuition we currently consider unmeasurable.