The people who will actually outperform aren't just better at their jobs — they'll show up with their own agents and personal software stack.
That's where the so-called 100x employee really comes from.
For me, the way this works is straightforward: whatever I'm doing, I'm simultaneously trying to make parts of it disappear.
While I'm working, I'm automating in parallel.
Sometimes that means building agents that can take the task over. Other times it means writing software that removes the task entirely.
Over time, that collection of scripts, tools, agents, and workflows stops being a set of "helpers" and starts behaving like an extension of how I think and operate.
Each week it gets more specific. More aligned to how I work. More capable of handling the things I shouldn't be spending human attention on.
At a certain point, it no longer feels like tooling. It feels like infrastructure.
A personal backend. A private ops function. A quiet swarm of specialized systems smoothing out friction everywhere I go.
Once you work this way, there's no real going back.
You start noticing repetition, manual steps, and clunky workflows as bugs — not in the company's processes, but in your system.
Fix a handful of those bugs every week and a few months later you're sitting on:
- your own automations
- your own research and analysis agents
- your own monitoring and alerting
- your own interfaces
- your own intelligence layer wrapped around the job
That's compound leverage.
And that's what creates the step-change.
Not talent. Not grind. Not working longer hours.
It's the slow, consistent accumulation of self-augmenting systems that quietly raise your ceiling until you're operating on a completely different curve.
Most people will still be doing tasks.
A smaller group will be designing systems that do the tasks for them.
Those people become hard to replace. They become force multipliers. They carry their leverage with them.
The companies that understand this — and don't fight it — will end up hiring individuals who effectively arrive with an internal R&D and automation function already built.
We're moving into the era of the equipped employee.
And that shift is going to be fundamental.