If You're Not Using AI Yet, You'll Be Unemployed Soon (I Learned This While Scrolling Reels)

Let me say something uncomfortable up front, and then I'll prove it with a story:

If you build things for the internet and you're still not using AI to do it — you're going to be in trouble. Not "someday." Soon.

I didn't believe this either. Then I watched an AI do two days of my work in 40 minutes while I lay in bed scrolling reels. Let me explain.

The extension that humbled me

I build a little Chrome extension called Intro Skipper. Exactly what it sounds like — it auto-skips the intros on Netflix, Hotstar/JioHotstar, and Crunchyroll so you never have to reach over and hit "Skip Intro" again. (It started as a dumb late-night idea between two lazy friends, but that's a story for another post.) Today, 350+ people use it every day.

Netflix and Hotstar were easy. Crunchyroll is where my ego got humbled.

Crunchyroll: 3 skips and a cursed video player

Crunchyroll doesn't just have an intro. It has an intro, a recap, and credits — and unlike the others, it doesn't even offer an auto-skip for credits. So I had to handle three separate skips.

Fine. Except Crunchyroll uses a completely different video player.

On Netflix and Hotstar, the "Skip Intro" button just pops up on its own while you watch. Easy — my extension sees it, clicks it, done. On Crunchyroll? The button is hidden. It only appears when the player controls appear… and the controls only appear when you move your mouse. No mouse movement, no button. No button, nothing to click.

So my problem was, essentially: how do I click a button that refuses to exist unless I wiggle the mouse?

Copilot's fix (the janky era)

At the time, I was building with GitHub Copilot. Its solution was… creative. It made the extension fake-hover over the video so the controls would appear, then click the skip button when it showed up.

And it worked! Sort of. The catch: to reveal the button, it had to keep the controls visible — so now you're trying to enjoy an anime with the seekbar and buttons flickering on screen the entire time. Not exactly cinematic.

I asked it to fix that. It did… kind of. After that, the extension worked sometimes. Other times it just didn't. Only on Crunchyroll. Every anime night became a coin flip.

So I left it half-broken for a while.

The rematch: me, one night, and Claude Code

Then two things happened: Crunchyroll tweaked their player again (breaking my flaky fix even more), and I finally bought a Claude Code subscription.

So one night, I decided to settle it. I opened Claude Code and gave it basically one prompt:

"Here's my extension. Crunchyroll skipping is broken and it shows the controls while watching, which is annoying. Go check how the player actually works on a real anime, then fix it."

I used Opus 4.8 in max thinking mode. And then I watched something slightly unsettling happen.

It thought for a while. Then it read through my entire codebase. Then it found the actual pain point. Then — and this is the part — it opened a browser tab, went to Crunchyroll, played an anime, and watched it play 2–3 times to see exactly how the player behaved. Then it wrote the fix.

Total time: about 30–40 minutes. My contribution during those 40 minutes? Lying in bed, scrolling reels. 🛌📱

The part where it out-engineered me

Here's the fix it landed on, and why it stung a little.

Both me and Copilot were stuck trying to click the button. Hover → reveal controls → click → repeat. Fighting the UI like idiots.

Claude didn't do that. It figured out that Crunchyroll exposes the exact skip timestamps through its own public data endpoint (.../skip-events/production/<mediaId>.json → intro, recap, credits, all with precise start/end times). So instead of clicking anything, it just reads those timestamps and seeks the video past each segment — literally the same thing Crunchyroll's own Skip button does internally.

No fake clicks. No fake mouse movement. Which means the controls never light up. Which means it works every single time, silently.

That's not a workaround. That's the correct solution. And I never would've thought of it that fast.

The comment it left in my own code kind of says it all:

// No synthetic clicks (the player ignores them anyway).
// No fake mouse events, so the player controls never light up.

The test

It told me it was done and to test it. I played an anime. It skipped the intro, the recap, and the credits — smoothly, invisibly, no controls flickering, every single episode. The thing I'd left broken for months, fixed in one sitting that I mostly spent on Instagram.

And I just… sat there for a second. Because it hit me:

It took my job. And I helped by doing nothing.

If I had done this by hand? Honestly, two days. Two days of digging through the player, reading network requests, guessing, and breaking things. It did it in 40 minutes while I watched reels of people making coffee.

Okay, here's the actual point

If your work lives on the internet — you write code, you build sites, you ship things — your job is changing whether you like it or not. AI can now do the annoying, time-consuming, "I'll figure it out eventually" parts fast. And companies know it.

Which means the expectation is quietly shifting. You're not being measured against "you, working normally" anymore. You're being measured against "you + AI." One person is now expected to output what used to take 3–4 people. That's not a prediction — go read any job posting from the last year.

I'm not saying this to scare you or to flex. I'm saying it because I felt it happen — to me, on my own project, in my own bed.

So the move is simple: start using AI. Seriously. Today. Not to replace your brain — to multiply it. Let it grind through the two-day slog so you can spend your time on the parts that actually need a human. The developers who lean in are going to look like they have superpowers. The ones who refuse are going to look… slow.

Get good at it before your manager asks why you aren't.

The backup plan 🪿

Or — you know — ignore all of this, keep hand-coding everything, and when it catches up: switch to manual labor, or open a goose farm. Honestly not the worst plan B. Geese are terrifying, fresh air is nice, and no goose has ever asked me to "sync up on Q3 velocity."

But if you'd rather keep your dev job — start using AI. That's the whole post.

👀 The extension that humbled me

🧩 Try Intro Skipper (Chrome): Chrome Web Store
🦊 Firefox: Firefox Add-ons
⭐ The code (yes, including the fix above): github.com/dsouravcom/intro-skipper-ext
💻 More of my stuff: sourav.dev