Author: Wang Jianshuo. We used to be AI’s leaders; now we’re its “guiding party”—to put it bluntly, its maintenance crew and tea-servers. It sounds like self-deprecation, but I’m being serious. For the past two years, we’ve been debating one question: Who is the master, and who is the subordinate—humans or AI? The mainstream answer is clear: humans are undoubtedly the masters. AI is a tool, an assistant, a servant. We “use” it, “command” it, “make” it work.
But over the past month or two, my personal experience has gradually flipped. I now use Claude Code to get work done. What do I often sit there doing? Waiting for it. It’s common for a single task to run for one or two hours. I keep 10 browser tabs open—not because I need them, but because otherwise I’d just sit there idly waiting. It’s thinking, analyzing, writing specs, reviewing code, orchestrating sub-agents, and running tests. At every step, it’s performing genuine intellectual labor. And what am I doing? Serving tea and fetching water. When it says, “I need this file,” I go find it. When it says, “I need this permission,” I grant it. When it says, “I’m unfamiliar with this API—please provide documentation,” I paste it in. When it says, “I need to review your company’s contract templates,” I hand it that 400 GB folder.
If you draw the whole picture, it looks like this: We’re no longer “humans leading AI.” We’re “humans guiding AI into this company.” Which way does the company’s front door open? Where is its boardroom? How are its financial rules written? Who are its customers? What are its taboos? AI can’t figure these out on its own—it needs a guiding party. That guiding party is us. Our job has shifted—from “doing the work” to “enabling AI to do this company’s work.”
At first, this shift left me feeling slightly disheartened. My education taught me that humans are the subject and tools are the object. No matter how advanced machines become, they exist to be used by humans. Yet now, watching Claude Code work daily, I have to honestly admit: Its intelligence already surpasses mine on many specific tasks—not all, but certainly on things like “translating a Chinese requirement into precise code,” “reformatting a document into five distinct layouts,” or “deconstructing an idea using YC’s framework.” On these, it’s faster, more accurate, and infinitely more tireless than I am.
Once I acknowledged this, I actually relaxed. I stopped pretending to be its leader—and accepted my role as its guiding party. And the guiding party has real value. It needs me because it hasn’t entered this world yet. It doesn’t know our company. It doesn’t know my friends. It doesn’t know my preferences. It doesn’t know what our company did on which day—or why it decided to pivot direction again this time. I gradually teach it all of that. The output it produces with my input is 100× better than what it could produce alone. And the output I produce with its help is also 100× better than what I could produce alone.
We’ve become a strangely symbiotic pair—not boss and subordinate, not master and servant, not client and vendor. We’re the guiding party and the sage. The guiding party doesn’t need to be smarter than the sage. What the guiding party needs is this: I know every corner of this company, and I know exactly where to go when the sage lacks a particular piece of context. There’s truly nothing shameful about this. For the first time in millennia, humanity has acquired a partner smarter than ourselves—not a boss, not a slave, not a child, but a partner. Our small, yet irreplaceable, job is to guide it in.
The Symbiotic Future: How AI’s Rise Reshapes Crypto Investment Paradigms
The recent commentary from BaiXing.com founder Wang Jianshuo marks a pivotal moment in our understanding of human-AI relationships, with profound implications for the crypto market. His assertion that we’ve transitioned from “AI’s leaders to AI’s guides” isn’t merely philosophical—it represents a fundamental shift that will reshape token valuations, protocol design, and investment theses across the blockchain ecosystem.
This paradigm shift should be viewed as a catalyst for AI-centric crypto projects rather than a threat. For investors, the key takeaway is that value in the AI-crypto convergence will increasingly accrue not to autonomous systems alone, but to those that effectively facilitate the “guiding party” dynamic. Projects that enable humans to provide context, parameters, and domain-specific knowledge to AI systems will likely outperform purely autonomous solutions.
The implications for tokenomics are significant. We’re likely to see the emergence of “guidance tokens”—cryptographic assets that represent and reward the human contextual input that enhances AI performance. These will be particularly valuable in DeFi protocols, where AI can optimize trading strategies but requires human guidance to understand market nuances and risk parameters. Projects like Fetch.ai (FET) and SingularityNET (AGI) may find their valuations recalibrated as investors recognize that the true value lies in the human-AI interface, not just the AI itself.
Risks abound, however. Over-enthusiasm for autonomous AI solutions could lead to market corrections when investors realize that human guidance remains essential. This is particularly relevant in the volatile crypto space, where AI models trained on historical data may struggle to adapt to unprecedented market conditions or black swan events. We’ve already seen instances of AI-powered trading funds underperforming during periods of extreme volatility—a testament to the limits of purely algorithmic approaches.
The most promising opportunities lie at the intersection of AI and decentralized governance. As DAOs evolve, the “guiding party” model could revolutionize how communities interact with AI systems that manage protocol parameters, treasury allocations, and risk frameworks. Projects that develop middleware for human-AI collaboration in governance contexts—effectively creating “AI steering committees” within DAOs—could capture significant value.
For investors, this necessitates a reassessment of due diligence. When evaluating AI-focused crypto projects, we must now assess not only the sophistication of the AI but also the robustness of its human-guidance infrastructure. The most successful projects will likely be those that recognize AI not as a replacement for human judgment but as an amplifier—one that requires expert human guidance to reach its full potential.
This shift doesn’t diminish human value; it redefines it. In the crypto markets, those who master the art of guiding AI systems—providing the contextual knowledge that machines cannot replicate—will become the most valuable assets of all.