Essay · Technology & Labor · 2026-03-31 · Chuan Liu
AI, labor, and the new shape of replacement
Companies aren't laying people off anymore. They're converting them into tokens.
There's an open-source project making the rounds lately called colleague-skill. The premise is simple: feed it a departing colleague's chat logs, documents, and emails, and it generates an AI Skill that can do their job. It replies in their tone, writes code to their technical standards, and — the developers note with apparent pride — even replicates their signature moves for deflecting blame, one to one.
"Transforming the coldness of goodbye into the warmth of a Skill. Welcome to cyber immortality."
That's more sincere than most company culture handbooks. Warm enough, in fact, to be faintly horrifying.
When an employee is let go, HR calls it optimization. Now the person leaves — but the Skill stays.
No salary. No benefits. No sick days, no slacking off, no labor disputes. The Skill doesn't smoke in the stairwell. It doesn't get tired. It doesn't file a complaint.
Companies aren't laying people off anymore. They're converting them into tokens. The severance package — N+1 months' pay — is a buyout of everything you produced in the last three years. Those outputs get fed into a model. A Skill gets trained. From that point on, the company doesn't need to purchase your labor. It purchases your tokens instead. Cheaper. More stable. No tribunal, no depression, no cigarette breaks in the hallway.
A token has no soul. A token doesn't get tired. A token doesn't know what it's saying. A token only knows what the next token should be.
But what if you distilled yourself — before they did?
It sounds, at first, like empowerment. You control the data. You hold the rights. The Skill is your extension, not their replacement. Like having a version of yourself that never complains. Who wouldn't want that?
Except: whose intellectual property is it, exactly? You are an asset. Your chat logs are an asset. Your documents are an asset. The email where you argued with that client — also an asset. Train a Skill on company chat records, and today you're distilling yourself voluntarily. Tomorrow the company says: we have the Skill now, you don't need to come in. Then what?
You thought you were distilling a Skill. You were accelerating your own tokenization.
The person gets laid off. The token stays.
The company wins. The AI wins.
The one who loses can't file an issue.
The ones winning are also gambling — betting they'll always be the ones doing the distilling, never the ones being distilled.
We are all tokens. Some of us just haven't been used up yet.