Founder of Baixing.com: We have transformed from leaders in AI to guides in AI

Author: Wang Jianshuo

We used to be the leaders of AI, now we are its guides—putting it bluntly, we are its maintenance workers, serving it tea.

It sounds like self-deprecation, but I am serious.

For the past two years, we have been discussing a question: Who is the master, and who is the subordinate, humans or AI?

The mainstream view is that humans are, of course, the masters. AI is a tool, an assistant, a servant. We "use" it, "drive" it, "make" it work.

But over the past couple of months, my own perception has slowly flipped.

I now work with Claude Code. What do I often do while sitting there? Wait for it. It’s common for it to take one or two hours to complete a task. I open 10 tabs because if I don’t, I can only wait idly.

It is thinking, analyzing, writing specs, reviewing, scheduling sub-agents, running tests. Every step it takes is genuine intellectual work.

And what am I doing? I am serving tea.

It says, "I need this document"—I go find it.

It says, "I need this permission"—I go grant it.

It says, "I’m not familiar with this API, give me some documentation"—I go paste it.

It says, "I need to see your company's contract template"—I give it that 400GB folder.

The whole situation can be illustrated like this:

We are no longer "the people leading AI." We are "the people bringing AI into this company."

Which way the company's door opens, where the board of directors is, how the financial rules are written, who the customers are, what the taboos are—these are things AI cannot enter on its own.

It needs a guide.

The guide is us.

Our job has changed from "doing work" to "enabling AI to do the work of this company."

At first, this made me a bit disheartened.

The education I received taught me—humans are the subjects, tools are the objects. No matter how powerful the machine is, it is still used by humans.

But now, watching Claude Code work every day, I must honestly admit: its intelligence has surpassed mine on many specific issues.

Not all issues. But in tasks like "translating a piece of Chinese requirements into precise code," "organizing a document into five formats," "breaking down an idea in the YC way"—it is faster than me, more accurate than me, and tireless compared to me.

After admitting this, I actually felt relaxed.

I no longer pretend to be its leader. I accept that I am its guide.

The guide also has its own value.

It needs me because it has never entered this world. It doesn’t know our company, it doesn’t know my friends, it doesn’t know my preferences, it doesn’t know what our company has done since when, or why we decided to change direction this time.

I tell it these things bit by bit.

The things it produces are 100 times better than what it could do alone.

The things I produce are 100 times better than what I could do alone.

We have become a very strange pair.

Not superior and subordinate, not master and servant, not party A and party B.

It is a guide and a great being.

The guide does not need to be smarter than the great being. What the guide needs is—I know every corner of this company, I know where to find what the great being lacks.

There’s really nothing to feel disheartened about.

For the first time in thousands of years, humanity has a partner that is smarter than us—not a boss, not a slave, not a child, but a partner.

Our small, yet irreplaceable job is to introduce it to the basics.