{"id":21435,"date":"2026-04-20T09:35:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-20T09:35:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/20\/chinese-tech-workers-ai-colleagues\/"},"modified":"2026-04-20T09:35:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-20T09:35:09","slug":"chinese-tech-workers-ai-colleagues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/20\/chinese-tech-workers-ai-colleagues\/","title":{"rendered":"Chinese tech workers are starting to train their AI doubles\u2013and pushing back"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Tech workers in China are being instructed by their bosses to train AI agents to replace them\u2014and it\u2019s prompting a wave of soul-searching among otherwise enthusiastic early adopters.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Earlier this month a GitHub project<\/a> called Colleague Skill, which claimed workers could use it to \u201cdistill\u201d their colleagues\u2019 skills and personality traits and replicate them with an AI agent, went viral on Chinese social media. Though the project was created as a spoof, it struck a nerve among tech workers, a number of whom told MIT Technology Review<\/em> that their bosses are encouraging them to document their workflows in order to automate specific tasks and processes using AI agent tools like OpenClaw or Claude Code.\u00a0<\/p>\n

To set up Colleague Skill, a user names the coworker whose tasks they want to replicate and adds basic profile details. The tool then automatically imports chat history and files from Lark and DingTalk, both popular workplace apps in China, and generates reusable manuals describing that coworker\u2019s duties\u2014and even their unique quirks\u2014for an AI agent to replicate.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Colleague Skill was created by Tianyi Zhou, who works as an engineer at the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Earlier this week he told Chinese outlet Southern Metropolis Daily<\/em> that the project was started as a stunt, prompted by AI-related layoffs and by the growing tendency of companies to ask employees to automate themselves. He didn\u2019t respond to requests for further comment.<\/p>\n

Internet users have found humor in the idea behind the tool, joking about automating their coworkers before themselves. However, Colleague Skill\u2019s virality has sparked a lot of debate about workers\u2019 dignity and individuality in the age of AI.<\/p>\n

After seeing Colleague Skill on social media, Amber Li, 27, a tech worker in Shanghai, used it to recreate a former coworker as a personal experiment. Within minutes, the tool created a file detailing how that person did their job. \u201cIt is surprisingly good,\u201d Li says. \u201cIt even captures the person\u2019s little quirks, like how they react and their punctuation habits.\u201d With this skill, Li can use an AI agent as a new \u201ccoworker\u201d that helps debug her code and replies instantly. It felt uncanny and uncomfortable, Li says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Even so,\u00a0 replacing coworkers with agents could become a norm. Since OpenClaw became a national craze<\/a>, bosses in China have been pushing tech workers to experiment with agents.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Although AI agents can take control of your computer, read and summarize news, reply to emails, and book restaurant reservations for you, tech workers on the ground say their utility has so far proven to be limited in business contexts. Asking employees to make manuals describing the minutiae of their day-to-day jobs the way Colleague Skill does is one way to help bridge that gap.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hancheng Cao, an assistant professor at Emory University who studies AI and work, believes that companies have good reasons to push employees to create work blueprints like these, beyond simply following a trend. \u201cFirms gain not only internal experience with the tools, but also richer data on employee know-how, workflows, and decision patterns. That helps companies see which parts of work can be standardized or codified into systems, and which still depend on human judgment,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

To employees, though, making agents or even blueprints for them can feel strange and alienating. One software engineer, who spoke with MIT Technology Review<\/em> anonymously because of concerns about their job security, trained an AI (not Colleague Skill) on their workflow and found that the process felt reductive\u2014as if their work had been flattened into modules in a way that made them easier to replace. On social media, workers have turned to bleak humor to express similar feelings. In one comment on Rednote, a user wrote that \u201ca cold farewell can be turned into warm tokens,\u201d quipping that if they use Colleague Skill to distill their coworkers into tasks first, they themselves might survive a little longer.<\/p>\n

The push for creating agents has also spurred clever countermeasures. Irritated by the idea of reducing a person to a skill, Koki Xu, 26 an AI product manager in Beijing, published an \u201canti-distillation\u201d skill<\/a> on GitHub on April 4. The tool, which took Xu about an hour to build, is designed to sabotage the process of creating workflows for agents. Users can choose between light, medium, and heavy sabotage modes depending on how closely their boss is observing the process, and the agent rewrites the material into generic, non-actionable language that would produce a less useful AI stand-in. A video Xu posted about the project went viral, drawing more than 5 million likes across platforms.<\/p>\n

Xu told MIT Technology Review<\/em> that she has been following the Colleague Skill trend from the start and that it has made her think about alienation, disempowerment, and broader implications for labor. \u201cI originally wanted to write an op-ed, but decided it would be more useful to make something that pushes back against it,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Xu, who has undergraduate and master\u2019s degrees in law, said the trend also raises legal questions. While a company may be able to argue that work chat histories and materials created on a work laptop are corporate property, a skill like this can also capture elements of personality, tone, and judgment, making ownership much less clear. She said she hopes Colleague Skill prompts more discussion about how to protect workers\u2019 dignity and identity in the age of AI. \u201cI believe it\u2019s important to keep up with these trends so we (employees) can participate in shaping how they are used,\u201d she says. Xu herself is an avid AI adopter, with seven OpenClaw agents set up across her personal and work devices.<\/p>\n

Li, the tech worker in Shanghai, says her company has not yet found a way to replace actual workers with AI tools, largely because they remain unreliable and require constant supervision. \u201cI don\u2019t feel like my job is immediately at risk,\u201d she says. \u201cBut I do feel that my value is being cheapened, and I don\u2019t know what to do about it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tech workers in China are being instructed by their bosses […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[226],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21435\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}