Graeber's framing keeps getting cited as if AI is finally the thing that kills bullshit jobs, but in my last two roles the AI rollout mostly created new ones: prompt review committees, eval ops, a whole guild of people writing internal "AI guidelines" docs nobody reads. The actual coding throughput on my team of nine looks roughly flat once you subtract the time spent cleaning up confidently wrong PRs. If anything we've just shifted where the busywork lives.

Graeber's framing breaks down once you're invoicing four clients at once. Half of what looks like bullshit from the outside (status meetings, recap docs, alignment threads) is the actual product when you're the external party, because trust gets manufactured through visible process. The genuinely useless work in my experience sits inside org charts, not across them.

Eighteen months in and the work that actually got automated wasn't the "bullshit" stuff, it was the substantive document review I trained two years to do. What's left on my desk is chasing signatures, formatting exhibits, and explaining to partners why the model hallucinated a citation.