Community has always been all that was left.
“The one thing that can't be automated is anything that is done face to face, which is what you're doing."
That's the text I got Tuesday evening, five minutes before I was supposed to teach a workshop on how to ship PRs with v0. My phone was blowing up: Matt's viral post about having 5 years left, Mrinank’s resignation from Anthropic, a voice memo preview where all I saw was "AI’s only making us more lonely with lack of IRL connections..."
I texted back: "I literally can't look at this right now, I'm about to teach women how to vibecode." Then, because my anxiety often gets the best of me: "Can you just give me the tl;dr so I'm not obsessing over it while I demo?”
That's when I got the reassurance: IRL can't be automated. I’m safe.
I turned my phone on DND and ran the workshop. It was a blast.
Over the next couple days, more friends transferred their fear into praise of my choices. "Community is the only defensible moat left,” they told me. “You’re exactly where you need to be,” they reassured. One friend got Claude to build me a business plan on how I could turn the summer camp I run into a full time operation. The irony was not lost on either of us, using the thing everyone's afraid of to tell me to double down on the thing they say it can't replace.
Everyone suddenly announcing “community is all we have left” like it's a revelation concerns me.
It makes me sad to think we ever forgot this. Community has always been the most (the only?) defensible attribute to a product, brand, experience, place - long before we assigned a budget and team to it. How we forgot that, baffles me.
We like to gather around ideas with others who share in our excitement. It’s not some new marketing hack that suddenly makes sense in "the age of AI," and when done well it doesn't just make a great executive dinner or flagship activation, it makes a memory.
And that is what we are all here to make. Always have been.
I run community for an AI company in San Francisco. I did not seek this role out because I predicted tech twitter would deem it "the only job left" in 2026. I also didn't live in a monastery in France because it was going to look good on Linkedin (certainly didn't feel that way when I explained to my boss why I needed to push back my start date nine months). And I didn’t bring 50 friends of friends to the woods for Camp Crossover because "IRL community events" were trending on MarketingTok (is that a thing? I assume so.)
I took this job because it's what I would be doing if I didn't get paid to do it.
As much as the internet would make you think I’m the safest person on the market, I don't always feel that way. I work at a company that has built the infrastructure for agentic development. I see what these tools can do every day. I shipped code (yes! they let me do this!) this week that a year ago would have taken me a college degree to learn. I'm not immune to the fear just because I'm “good with people” and throw a fun party.
I feel lucky that the thing I'm good at happens to be the thing people are remembering they care about right now. But I didn't get good at it to reverse engineer job security. I got good at it because I can’t help myself from doing it, and I just kept following that energy.
Fear is a motivating factor. It can push you to do great things or safe things. I hope no college student reads these posts and thinks they need to become a “community manager” because that's the only job left. With that logic, I would have become a storyteller six months ago, a forward deployed engineer last fall, and a PM when I graduated college.
Find the thing that gives you energy. That fires you up not because anyone else tells you it should, not because it translates to a job description (yet), but because you can’t help yourself. Then use AI, use every tool available, to position yourself to do more of it.
It's exhausting to optimize for a version of safety that keeps changing every six months. It's a privilege to get paid to do what naturally gives you energy.
I don't know if the market will figure itself out. I haven't seen enough cycles to say that with confidence. History suggests it will, and I’m choosing to trust that.
But I do know that our desire to make memories together isn’t going anywhere. And even if all this doesn't work out, I'd much rather go out chasing that.
