Layoffs Are the Norm, OPC Is the Way Out, But Most People Are Going in the Wrong Direction

Layoffs Are the Norm, OPC Is the Way Out, But Most People Are Going in the Wrong Direction

On the day Fable 5 launched, I watched a few demos: a person said a few words to a terminal, and it broke down tasks, dispatched sub-agents, wrote code, ran tests, fixed bugs, and finally delivered a working project. The whole process, the person just occasionally glanced at it.

This kind of work, three years ago, would have been a week’s workload for a small team of three to five people.

And then? Amazon cut tens of thousands of corporate jobs in 2025, with a very straightforward reason — the organization needs to slim down for the AI era. Klarna announced long ago that one AI assistant did the work equivalent of 700 customer service reps. These are already old news.

In the next few years, layoffs will be the norm. There’s no suspense about that — the only suspense is who’s next and when.

I. OPC Will Become Mainstream, But Mainstream Doesn’t Equal Profitable

Where will the laid-off people go? Many will move toward the same answer: OPC, One Person Company.

The logic sounds smooth: AI has driven the cost of production tools down to the floor. One person plus a set of AI tools can replace what used to need a small team. Claude Code for writing code, image generation models for design, ready-made tools for video editing, customer service, copywriting — everything is available. One person is an army — this statement has never been closer to literal truth than today.

But the problem is —

The vast majority of OPCs are consumers, not producers.

In plain English: most people doing OPC don’t make money.

If you look closely, what are the most profitable businesses in the so-called “OPC wave”? It’s the people selling courses, selling tool subscriptions, selling “how to build a one-person company” tutorials. In other words, most people in this wave play the role of the ones paying. They buy courses, tools, templates, community tickets, and then produce a bunch of content nobody reads and products nobody uses, and quietly exit a few months later.

This is exactly the same structure as the Gold Rush. In the 1849 California Gold Rush, the ones who really got rich were Levi Strauss (selling jeans) and merchants selling shovels, while the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of prospectors didn’t even earn back their travel expenses.

Tools becoming cheaper doesn’t mean business becomes easier. Quite the opposite — the cheaper the tools, the more people enter the market, the fiercer the competition, and the less value mediocre output holds.

II. The Most Successful OPC Model: Do the Dirty Work Manually, Serve High-Value Clients

So how can an OPC actually make money?

From what I’ve observed, there’s currently only one successful model: Do the dirty work manually, serve high-value clients.

What is dirty work? It’s those tasks that are cumbersome, detail-grinding, not easily digested by AI for now, and big companies don’t want to bother with. Helping cross-border business owners handle tax filings. Helping traditional enterprises migrate twenty years of messy data to the cloud. Helping a blogger who makes tens of millions annually manage all backend delivery. Helping a factory owner pull the inquiry process out of WeChat groups and turn it into a system.

These tasks have three common characteristics:

1. The customer has money and an urgent pain point.
2. The delivery is labor-intensive and hard to fully standardize.
3. Most people find it beneath them.

Pay attention to the third point. Many people feel that dirty work is shameful, thinking that OPC should aim for “passive income” — develop once, sell infinitely. That’s the wrong direction. After AI standardizes everything that can be standardized, it is precisely the non-standardizable dirty work that becomes the last profit zone for ordinary people.

And there’s one hard rule: Never take a single job for less than 8,000 RMB.

This figure isn’t pulled out of thin air. Below this number, you’ll be serving price-sensitive clients — they demand the most, pay the least, have the worst repeat business, and you’ll drain all your energy on people who exhaust you. With a higher average order value, you can afford to go deep, do thorough work, and build a reputation — and reputation is the only growth engine for an OPC. A one-person company has no sales team, no ad budget. Your last job is your next job.

Serving ten high-value clients is better than catering to a thousand freeloaders. The sooner you figure this out, the better.

III. The More Powerful AI Becomes, The More Valuable Patience Becomes

Finally, something more fundamental.

AI is powerful, but to be honest — I believe the most important quality for humans to survive in the face of powerful AI is patience.

Sounds like chicken soup? Quite the opposite — it’s a cold structural judgment.

When AI becomes powerful, something subtle happens: it makes more people work superficially.

Think about the current state. Writing an article? AI can churn out 3,000 words in a minute, so no one is willing to spend three days refining a single point. Building a product? AI can create a prototype overnight, so no one is willing to spend three months understanding an industry. Learning something new? AI chews up any knowledge and feeds it to you, so no one is willing to read a difficult book all the way through.

Everyone is using AI to accelerate, everyone’s output is increasing, but the average depth of output is collapsing. The entire market is flooded with things that “look okay” — okay articles, okay products, okay services.

What does this mean?

When everyone can easily produce a 60-point result, the price of a 60-point result drops to zero. And the gap between a 95-point and a 60-point result has never depended on tools — it depends on time.

It’s you being willing to stay in one domain for five years, while others switch tracks every three months. It’s you being willing to serve a client until they proactively refer others, while others disappear after collecting payment. It’s you being willing to keep building your wall that won’t be visible for three years, while everyone chases this month’s hot trend.

Herbert Simon once said that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. Apply the same logic to today: a wealth of AI capabilities creates a poverty of patience. And scarce things are always where pricing power lies.

Time ultimately rewards the extremely patient few. AI hasn’t changed this rule — it has just magnified the cost of impatience tenfold.

Final Words

The wave of layoffs will push many people toward OPC — that’s the big trend. But what the trend doesn’t explicitly say is: most people will become fuel for this wave, not its beneficiaries.

If you want to stand on the producer side, the path is actually straightforward: pick a high-value group of people, bend down to do their dirty work, never take a job for less than 8,000 RMB, and then use the patience that others lack to keep doing it for five years.

If you’re not afraid of hard work, and you genuinely want to make a living through service, the table below can serve as a reference for choosing a direction — each category matches the three characteristics mentioned earlier: customers can pay, pain is urgent, delivery is labor-intensive.

The common rule across this table is simple: You never make money from technology itself — you make money from the fact that your customers “can’t afford to make mistakes and don’t have time to do it themselves.” The category can change, but this rule won’t.

AI handles speed. You handle slowness.