I spent a late night last week getting Noto Sans to load correctly across 16 languages in a Rails app. Not the most interesting part of the app I am working on, but just font subsetting and an efficient asset and resource pipeline config. Hours on a thing that has nothing to do with why the project exists.
That is when it hit me – every job has a core motion. The thing underneath the job title that actually makes the work work. For me, it has always been about sitting with ambiguity until it turns into something coherent. Reading a situation, finding the frame. Whether it was designing through the UX process or structuring a policy report now, the skill was the same. That part, I want to keep doing by hand.
But then there is everything else. The formatting. The first draft of an email, I already know the shape of it. I can read CSS, but I do not love writing. The deck that exists because someone needs a deck. It is the stuff around the stuff, the secondary skills that a job demands but that aren’t really why you are in the room.
A chef’s primary skill is taste. Knowing what works, when to pull back, and when to push. But a chef also orders inventory. If a tool allowed the chef to stay at the stove longer, nobody would call that cheating. Right?
I think the worry is that AI wastes away the thing that matters. And it can if you let it reason on your behalf and just accept what comes back. That is outsourcing the one thing that justifies your seat in a room.
I will always keep doing my primary skills the slow way. Keep reading and keep sitting with the discomfort. But not everything that feels hard is core. Sometimes it is just unfamiliar and not important. There, I will let AI carry my bags.
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