203: No Juniors, No Google, No Chill: Survival Tips for the AI Shake-Up with Erin Weigel and Lukas Vermeer

What does life look like when search engines, junior tech jobs, and even human therapists start losing ground to generative AI? In this lightning-charged round-table, host Sani sits down with experimentation legends Erin Weigel and Lukas Vermeer to test-drive a future that’s already creeping into the present.

In this episode you’ll hear:

• “RIP Google SERPs?”. Lukas explains why he’s stopped opening SERPs and lets ChatGPT do the leg-work instead, and what that means for SEO as a profession. 
• Therapy by chatbot. A frank debate on the ethics of replacing licensed counselors with LLMs, complete with Erin’s tale of an AI that literally narrated its own fake empathy. 
• The vanishing ladder. Why companies are skipping junior hires, how that starves tomorrow’s seniors, and whether YouTube “mentors” can fill the gap. 
• Layoffs, wage pressure & the fourth AI hype-cycle. Erin argues that generative tools are becoming the C-suite’s favorite excuse to “do more with less,” accelerating job insecurity across tech. 
• Blackout reality check. Sani recounts a one-day power failure that froze an entire city, highlighting just how thin our digital safety net really is. 
• Off-grid plans & doom-prep kits. From Raspberry Pi LLMs to a solar-powered farmhouse in France, the crew swaps tongue-in-cheek tips for surviving an AI-augmented apocalypse. 

About the guests

• Erin Weigel is the former principal designer at Booking.com, now charting the blurry boundary between human-centered design and AI-generated “V-Zero” mock-ups.
• Lukas Vermeer is the ex-director of experimentation at Booking.com and Vista; known for turning data questions into live product experiments. Both Erin and Lukas started the same day at Booking.com, one of many shared origin stories they unpack. 

No Hacks is a podcast about web performance, technical SEO, and the agentic web. Hosted by Slobodan "Sani" Manic.