Your boss wants you to build a version of yourself that doesn't need a salary. That's the situation facing a growing number of tech workers in China, where managers are reportedly instructing employees to train AI agents - software programs that can take actions and make decisions on someone's behalf - that can replicate their specific skills and work style.
The backlash has been notable. Earlier this month, a GitHub project called Colleague Skill surfaced online claiming it could let workers "distill" a colleague's skills and personality traits into an AI replica. The project quickly became a flashpoint - not because of what it could technically do, but because of who was ordering its use. According to MIT Technology Review, workers who had previously been enthusiastic early adopters of AI tools are now doing a harder rethink about where this trajectory leads.
The uncomfortable part isn't the technology. There's a meaningful difference between choosing to use AI to handle the repetitive parts of your job and being told by your employer to hand over a detailed blueprint of how you think and work. The first is a productivity tool. The second is closer to writing your own replacement manual.
What Colleague Skill Actually Does
The project's premise is straightforward: feed it enough examples of someone's output - their writing, their decisions, their communication patterns - and it produces an AI model trained specifically on that person's working style. The framing in the project description is collaborative, workers helping each other "capture" institutional knowledge. But when the instruction to use it comes from management, "capturing expertise" starts to sound like documentation for an exit package.
This is the tension that's proving hard to resolve. AI agents have been sold to workers as tools that handle the low-value work, freeing up time for judgment and creativity. The shift to treating those agents as role substitutes rather than assistants changes the relationship entirely. You're no longer using a tool. You're training your successor.
The Pushback Is About Power, Not Technology
These aren't Luddites. The MIT Technology Review piece makes clear these are workers who adopted AI tools early and use them regularly. Their hesitation isn't about whether AI can replicate their skills - it's about who controls the replica once it exists, and what the company does with it next.
That makes this a different kind of debate than the standard "automation will take jobs" argument. The typical framing is that AI will eventually displace workers, and companies will make that call when the economics work. The Colleague Skill moment is something else: workers being asked to participate directly in building the system that displaces them, as an assigned work task, right now. That's a meaningfully different ask.
The pushback in China suggests plenty of people recognize the distinction - even if they haven't yet figured out how to refuse.