2025-07-09

The past few days were subject to high-intensity learning a bit of programming. I am taking my role at work to be that person who pushes for innovative practices. In my free time, I am trying to learn the n8n workflow platform in an attempt to understand automation using a GUI. At first, it was all genuine curiosity. But right now, I think I am trying to automate myself out of my own work.

Last month, I felt the heavy surge of job insecurity due to AI. I wallowed in the anxiety of losing my job to an AI agent as I begin to get assigned to tasks that require me to have an extensive knowledge about AI training. Back then, I didn't have a single idea on the actual methodology of how you actually train AI except Retrieval-Augmented Generation, where you treat the LLM as a databank of primary sources where it can pull information on-demand based on your prompt. I didn't know about dark data or structured datasets. I just thought you feed an LLM the data that you want and then it will do its magic to make sense of everything based on your prompt.

This idea of automating myself came from this desire to have more time to actually do the personal project that I have been working on. I argue that if it is an inevitability that AI tools and agents will soon take over my job, I have the capacity to make it more difficult for it to colonize my expertise. The need to adapt with a clear plan starts to become the only viable move because I believe that there is a certain requirement of a personal understanding when it comes to AI. It means understanding how it works, what can it do and not do, what aspects of my job is it good at, which tasks in my job am I confident that I can beat this AI, and how might its use transform my field of expertise.

At this point, I see myself moving in a direction where I would become indispensable in supervising how these AI tools work, at least within my own scope of influence. So I started understanding automation, even at its most basic, low-level, noob understanding using a drag and drop interface. I can leave the coding for now with the AI tools at my own disposal. I am learning how to use them to my own benefit while expanding my own understanding of the rapidly evolving socio-political and economic landscape brought by these disruptive innovations in tech.