A man says he was about to pay a college student for up to 10 days of stock screening. Then he and Claude finished it in about three hours

A Reddit user said Anthropic’s Claude completed a stock research task in about three hours that he expected would take a college student up to 10 days. His post sparked debate online over whether entry-level jobs are becoming vulnerable to automation.

As reported by News18, the user shared his experience on r/TwentiesIndia in a post asking, “Are entry-level jobs cooked?” He had been looking for college students to manually go through stocks listed on Screener and find ones that matched a specific stock-screening hypothesis he had developed.

He said the task did not require specialized financial knowledge but did need a human touch. He estimated that someone new to the process would take around seven to 10 days to finish it, and he was ready to pay up to ₹4,000, or roughly $45, for the work.

A friend’s suggestion ended up saving him ₹4,000

A friend suggested he try AI instead. The user said he had tried to automate the task before but struggled, because his hypothesis involved a lot of human judgment that was hard to translate into code.

He decided to try again, spending about three hours working with Claude to refine the logic and fix issues along the way. He said the tool delivered exactly what he needed, saving him the ₹4,000 he had set aside for a human worker.

The user also questioned the idea that AI tools are only cheap now because they are heavily subsidized. He said that even at standard API pricing, the task would likely have cost him only a few hundred rupees.

He then raised a bigger question about whether AI could eventually take over most entry-level jobs, suggesting the process may have already started. The idea has reached other workplaces too, as one woman found when an AI applicant pitched itself for her role.

The post drew plenty of reactions from Reddit users weighing in on what automation means for the future. One user raised the cost argument, saying that once people start paying the real price for tokens, “4000 is pretty cheap.”

Another user stressed knowing when to use AI, writing, “Like i would never trust AI for things that requires 100% accuracy.” A third user said juniors used to learn on the boring tickets, “and those are exactly what got automated first.” That commenter added that companies will now have to pay for training on purpose, though most will not.

Attack of the Fanboy was unable to independently verify the user’s account, as it comes solely from a Reddit post.