title: Costless Sacrifice
author: Packy McCormick
content_type: article
publication: Not Boring by Packy McCormick
published: 2026-03-05T15:14:24+00:00
source_url: https://www.notboring.co/p/costless-sacrifice
word_count: 3046
Costless Sacrifice
Brief
Packy McCormick's essay 'Costless Sacrifice' argues that AI-driven scale has made many creative and hiring activities costless, destroying the informational signal that human sacrifice once provided. He marshals labor-market and platform metrics — 4.3% unemployment, 80.9% prime-age employment, 3.3% hiring rate in H2 2025, Greenhouse’s +26% recruiting workload (Q3 2024), ~500:1 applications-to-recruiter, a 79% fall in cover-letter signal on Freelancer.com — and SemiAnalysis’s finding that Claude Code accounted for ~4% of public commits with a 20%+ projection for 2026. Drawing on Beniger’s Control Revolution, Packy warns this surplus of low‑cost information fuels a Red Queen race and urges creators to consciously pay real costs to preserve meaning and competitive advantage.
Why it matters
Packy McCormick argues that AI is creating a 'costless sacrifice' problem: machine-generated cover letters, essays, and code flood systems with low-cost outputs that erase the signal of human effort.
Key details
- Empirical signals cited: U.S. unemployment 4.3% and Prime-Age employment 80.9% (Jan), hiring rate 3.3% in H2 2025; Greenhouse reported recruiting workload +26% (Q3 2024) and an applications-to-recruiter ratio ≈500:1; Freelancer.com saw a 79% drop in correlation between cover-letter customization and offers after introducing AI tools.
- Coding automation is accelerating: SemiAnalysis estimates Claude Code authored ~4% of public GitHub commits at time of writing with a projection of 20%+ of daily commits by end of 2026 — illustrating rapid substitution of human labor in software.