Packy McCormick delivers a startling diagnosis for a labor market that feels broken despite strong headline numbers: the problem isn't a lack of jobs, but a collapse in the value of effort. By reframing the flood of AI-generated applications as a "costless sacrifice," he exposes a paradox where the very tools designed to help us compete are rendering our hard work invisible. This is not just a story about technology; it is a crisis of signal in an economy drowning in noise.
The Threshing Floor of the Job Market
McCormick anchors his argument in a biblical narrative that feels surprisingly modern. He recounts the story of King David, who refused to offer a burnt offering that cost him nothing, insisting instead on paying for the land and oxen to ensure the sacrifice had weight. "But the king replied to Araunah, 'No, I insist on paying you for it. I will not sacrifice to the Lord my God burnt offerings that cost me nothing,'" McCormick quotes, using this ancient principle to critique the modern hiring landscape.
The author argues that the job market has become a place where the "cost" of applying has plummeted to zero, destroying the signal that once separated serious candidates from the crowd. He cites data showing that the applications-to-recruiter ratio has ballooned to 500-to-1, a fourfold increase in just four years. "Because it's easier to apply, the volume of applications is up," McCormick explains, noting that AI tools now generate custom cover letters that make the quality of the application indistinguishable from the noise.
This dynamic creates a "Red Queen's Race," a concept McCormick has explored before, where participants must run faster just to stay in the same place. He writes, "Here's the hard thing about easy things: if everyone can do something, there's no advantage to doing it, but you still have to do it anyway just to keep up." The tragedy, as he sees it, is that the "burnt offerings that cost nothing and the burnt offerings that cost everything smell the same" to overwhelmed human recruiters.
The pretty good is the enemy of the potentially great.
Critics might argue that this view romanticizes the inefficiency of the old system, where a perfect cover letter didn't guarantee a job either. However, McCormick's point is not about efficiency, but about the signaling value of the effort itself. When effort is cheap, it ceases to be a signal of commitment.
The Crisis of Control in Reverse
McCormick expands this logic beyond hiring to the broader production of ideas and code. He points to the explosion of AI-generated content, noting that "4% of GitHub public commits are being authored by Claude Code right now," with projections suggesting this could reach over 20% by 2026. The sheer volume of output is creating a new kind of scarcity: attention.
He draws a fascinating parallel to James R. Beniger's The Control Revolution, which argued that the Industrial Revolution created a "crisis of control" because material production outpaced our ability to manage it. McCormick suggests we are now living through the inverse: "We have the opposite Crisis now, where the information has outstripped that which it was born to control." Just as the telegraph and standardized clocks were invented to manage the speed of trains, we are now drowning in a speed of information that no human can process.
The author observes that the market for feeling productive is now larger than the market for being productive. "Most people, most of the time, want to click and watch the number go up," he writes, capturing the psychological trap of the AI era. We are generating "hollow versions of a thing filling up the place where the one full one should have gone."
This is where the concept of the "Threshing Floor" becomes critical. In the historical context of the related deep dive, the threshing floor was a place of separation—where grain was beaten to separate the valuable wheat from the worthless chaff. Today, the threshing floor is broken. "The applications-to-recruiter ratio is now about 500-1," McCormick notes, implying that the mechanism for separating the signal from the noise has been overwhelmed by the volume of the chaff.
If they cost nothing, they signify nothing.
A counterargument worth considering is that AI might eventually lower the barrier to entry for high-quality work, allowing more people to produce "great" things rather than just "good" ones. But McCormick's skepticism suggests that without the friction of effort, the cultural value of the output diminishes regardless of its technical quality.
The Human Cost of Simulacra
The most poignant part of McCormick's commentary is the human cost of this dynamic. He describes a scenario where a candidate who spends weeks crafting a heartfelt, specific application for their dream job is invisible, drowned out by 1,732 AI-generated applications that took minutes to produce. "The person whose dream job it actually was... no human ever even saw that person's application," he writes.
This creates a perverse outcome where the "winners" of the job lottery are often those who applied to hundreds of roles they don't care about, while those who cared deeply are left behind. "Dream crushed, they've now applied to 123 jobs themselves, none of which they really care about," McCormick observes, highlighting the erosion of passion and purpose in the workforce.
He concludes by suggesting that the value of a creative act is often tied to the time and struggle invested in it. "Half of the value of the post would have been the result of that effort, but half would have been the effort itself," he argues. When we remove the cost, we remove the meaning.
Bottom Line
McCormick's most compelling insight is that the scarcity of the future will not be content or code, but the human willingness to endure the friction of creation. His argument holds up well against the data on application volume, though it relies on the assumption that human attention remains the ultimate bottleneck. The biggest vulnerability in this analysis is the possibility that new filtering technologies will emerge to restore the signal-to-noise ratio, but until then, the "costless sacrifice" remains a powerful metaphor for our current stagnation.