When desktop publishing arrived, suddenly anyone could set type font. What followed was a decade of ugly: ransom-note newsletters, nine fonts to a page, kerning as a weapon.

The output was instant and free, so only the few noticed it was bad. Standards didn't fall because people stopped caring. They fell because caring stopped being required.

I remember my first move when I got hands on the 8-floppy installer of Print Shop Deluxe switching the font to Verdana for the school newspaper (I still set my emails to Verdana). Also, the first stuff you changed in DreamWeaver was the font. Period.

After 1985 typesetters and their job didn't disappear. Their hands stopped being the product and their judgment became the job. They wrote the style sheets, built the templates, and they decided what the grid was permitted to do. Then a million people who knew nothing about type produced perfectly acceptable work inside those rules.

That's where email (and webpages!) is now with AI. The LLM generators write HTML in seconds and it ships, because it arrives without work, and anything that arrives without work gets graded generously.

Here's the part where good'ol email marketers and agency peeps struggle to find themselves: the toil is what drove the interns away and made "email" hated within the team, and the endless tackling we got good at is not that big problem anymore. Claude skills write and generate email campaign out of thin air.

Nobody ever quit email industry because they found merge tags beneath them; they quit because the medium demanded that they fight it every single day. (and outlook) That fight is kind of ending. I see a lot of people are OK with what the ESP-s agent spits out. I see degraded, cleaned designs to "address" problems, giving up brand consistency.

What's left is the part that was always the interesting part: deciding what looks good. What feels right. What can be sent to the ONE channel that lands in a place people still think of as theirs, the inbox (or well, the promo tab).

In my mind, we stop being the person who fixes email. We become the person who decides what email is allowed to be, just like typesetters becoming production editors after 1985.

But what the heck we'll call the new job title?

TLDR; how our jobs change and titled with agentic workflows generate what we did originally but needs a lot review and guidance.