This is a companion guide for Dan Shipper's essay 'After Automation,' published by Every.to. The essay argues that AI makes yesterday's competence cheap, which paradoxically creates more human work—not less—because cheap competence leads to more attempts, more sameness, and greater demand for human judgment and framing. This repository provides a structured way to understand, examine, and most importantly apply the essay's ideas to your own work. It includes a claims map, starter prompts, objection responses, and real-world workflow examples from Every's own AI-native practices. Users paste a simple instruction into their AI assistant to work through the material and develop practical human-AI collaboration workflows.
How It Works
You find Dan Shipper's essay 'After Automation' and read about his surprising discovery: automating everything actually created more work for humans, not less.
The argument resonates—you've noticed AI makes things easier, yet somehow there's always more to do. You want to understand why and what to do about it.
You discover there's a free companion guide on GitHub that helps you actually use the essay's ideas in your own work, not just read about them.
You paste a simple instruction into your AI coding assistant, and it learns about the essay and how to help you apply it.
Get a clear explanation of the core claim and why it matters
Dive into the claims and sources to see what's really behind the argument
Have your assistant learn about your situation and suggest practical workflows to try
Test the essay against the strongest counterarguments you can think of
Following the prompts and examples, you build a real human-AI workflow where you frame the work, your assistant executes, and you review the results.
You walk away with a practical approach to collaborate with AI that plays to human strengths—framing, judgment, and specificity.
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