The No Fire, No Hire Stalemate: What AI Is Actually Doing to Agency Jobs

Every week brings a new prediction that AI will erase half of white-collar work. As the CEO of a digital agency, I’m responsible for decisions about hiring or firing. If AI were eliminating tech jobs on a vast scale, we’d see it in the data. Layoffs.fyi isn’t showing the surge the forecasts promised, tech unemployment looks about like it did a few years ago, and Lullabot is busier than we’ve ever been. Overall unemployment is low to average. At a recent digital agency event, other agency leaders called this a “no fire, no hire” environment—a holding pattern, not a collapse.

Here’s my hypothesis. AI is genuinely good at execution and speed: generating the code, the layout, the first draft. What it can’t do is decide what’s worth building. Vibe-code something in an afternoon and it feels like you replaced an engineer, but that was the first 80% of the job. The last 20% — the judgment about what the work is actually for — is where the value lives. That professional, senior human judgement in the loop is indispensible. The skill that matters now isn’t asking “can AI do this?” It’s asking “why are we doing this at all?” The work still needs people who can decide what’s worth doing and whether it’s any good. Dries said the work won’t disappear but it will move from implementation to specification and validation. I agree.

Not everyone is so sanguine. David C. Baker, a digital agency pundit, recently told an agency leader event that a quarter of the agencies in it would be gone within three years, and that the creative jobs being lost aren’t coming back. He argues it will be the shops that sell execution that fail. He may be right. But that view assumes a fixed amount of work for AI to eat into. I think the opposite is possible. Jevons paradox says that when a resource gets cheaper to produce, we don’t make less of it — we make far more. A mountain of software never got built because it cost too much to justify; as AI lowers that cost, the work doesn’t shrink, it multiplies.

This talk will explore the future of agency work, what the data actually shows, why the durable work is the ‘why’ and not the ‘how,’ and the real choice underneath it all: whether multiplying work just makes us busier than ever, or whether — if we’re deliberate — it’s what finally lets us do less.