Drew Lentz

Chief Technology Officer, WirelessNerd

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The three staffers I didn't hire, and what that says about your job

Drew Lentz · 2026-08-26

An electric pickup truck on a wide Texas highway at dusk, pulling out to pass a slower car in the left lane, with open flat country stretching away on both sides.

I was about to hire three staffers to gather data from all 254 county websites in Texas. Instead I spawned a handful of Grok bots named after presidents and had the data I needed in less than 24 hours. The job I was about to post never needed to exist.

That is the part people miss when they ask whether AI is going to take jobs. It doesn't take the job. It makes the job never exist in the first place, and that is what puts you on one side of the fence or the other: either you are the person making other people's roles unnecessary, or you are the person whose role never gets posted.

So I want to talk about moving faster. We are at a critical time right now, where the people who understand how to use the tools in front of them are catapulting themselves ahead with the way we can build things and solve problems, and if you are not keeping up, they will be moving so fast around you that the lane disappears. What follows is why that feels like an electric truck, what happened when I handed a hiring plan to George Washington instead, and why the savings had almost nothing to do with payroll.

Why does an electric truck explain this better than a slide does?

It occurred to me while I was driving yesterday. I drive an electric truck, a Ford Lightning, and the right lane was closing while the guy in the left lane sped up to match me every time I did. So I tapped the accelerator, popped out in front of him and was gone. It was easy, it was like nothing, because he was in a gas powered vehicle and I had that power sitting right there, and it reminded me of what AI is doing for me every day when I solve problems.

But that's because I'm up to date with what's going on. That's because I'm using the tools, because I'm immersed in it, and because I don't work without it as my sidekick. If I need to solve a problem, I have any number of tools available, and I have my favorites right now, but I also have some of the new stuff that's coming out — things like Grok bots that literally allow me to spawn workers to go do things for me, and because I understand how to use them, I can be super efficient.

The problem is that there's so much out there that nobody knows how to keep up with it, and then you have to learn every new tool that comes out in order to really maximize its potential. So if people aren't keeping up to date with what's going on, not only are they at a disadvantage, but the people who are learning these things have their foot on the same accelerator I had in that left lane, and they are speeding past. They understand how to use the tools, or they've got one tool they've gotten really good at, and they've figured out how to manipulate everything they're doing with it and have that be their superpower.

What happened when I gave the job to George Washington?

Here is what that looked like in practice, yesterday. I sat down in a morning meeting about a political website I'm working on, and I was talking to a political consultant. I told him it would be really helpful to go out and get data from all the different counties in the state of Texas, and Texas has 254 counties, so I needed a way to gather data from all of them, across all these different websites and all these different file types, PDF, HTML, CSV, whatever it is.

He said, yes, we can find the funding, put it together and find a staffer or two to go out and do that, gather the data and bring it together. And I said, okay, but once that's done, we also need someone who can sit there and normalize that data and put it into a file format we can understand, because of all those different file formats.

Then I got home and I thought, my friend just talked to me about Grok bots. Let me see if I can do that. So I built a Grok bot named George Washington, and I gave it the exact same charge I gave the person who was finding me the staff and the funding. I literally said, “General, go to all 254 county websites in the state of Texas, look for this data, bring me this data.”

Then I spawned another Grok bot, and this one was obviously named John Adams. I told it, “When General Washington is done, John, I need you to go through and normalize all the datasets as he's uploading them into this Google Drive.”

Then I went back to George and gave it a really important command. I said, spawn as many agents as you need or as many bots as you need. Next thing you know, I had Benjamin Franklin, James Monroe, Abraham Lincoln… I had all these presidents doing all this work for me. And it was really fun! It understood what it needed to do in order to satisfy the requirement.

Who actually pays for the version where you hire people?

I had done two things. I had alleviated the need to hire three staffers to go do this for me, and more importantly, I had avoided the real cost of doing that, which isn't just the three staffers: it's their insurance, their payroll and their taxes.

It wouldn't have been a lot of money overall, but the most important thing to me was the time. I didn't have to train them, I didn't have to show them what to do, I didn't have to watch them get the data wrong and then go back and fix it. I had the ability to just punch the accelerator.

Once I spawned those agents and got them doing what they were doing, I was able to get the information I needed and get back to the core project in less than 24 hours. That was the best part, because it was going to take 24 hours just to come up with a job description to put out there, never mind going out and finding the people to do it. My speed to market was so incredible because I was using AI to do it that it really felt like I was tapping that accelerator and passing everybody else. That matters because as more people develop programs and applications to solve problems, this gives them the ability to get to the root of the problem quicker, and to the root of solving it quicker, without having to slow down.

Wasn't AI supposed to level the playing field?

And so there's this gap that wasn't supposed to be there. I believed the promise that AI would give everyone a level playing field, because it makes it easier for everyone to do all of the things. What I didn't take into account was that the people who are really good were going to be so much better at doing things, and the Texas project is my evidence: the difference wasn't budget or headcount, it was knowing what to reach for.

So this is what I'm really looking at. It's not that AI is going to take the job. It's that AI is going to make the job not even exist, because AI gives you the ability to get so much done quickly that the job won't even need to be there to be taken away in the first place. But in order to do that, you have to understand what's going on, and if you don't, that's the lane I was talking about, closing on you while somebody else taps the accelerator.

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