Knowledge work productivity is getting cheap. Fast.

AI can write the code, draft the document, and generate the plan. The time it takes and the cleverness of the approach are becoming irrelevant. Speed and output volume, the things that used to signal skill, are getting commoditized.

So what’s left?

Discernment. Judgment. Knowing which question to ask next. Predicting the outlier that’s going to cause trouble down the road. Recognizing when the output is technically correct but pointed at the wrong problem. These things mattered before AI. They matter even more now.

The catch is that you still have to put in your 2k, 5k, 10k hours to develop these skills. There’s no shortcut to the experience that lets you see what others can’t. You have to have built things, broken things, and lived through the failures before the pattern recognition kicks in.

Which creates a real problem for the next generation coming into the field. A lot of the foundational work they would have done (the small bugs, the basic implementations, the unglamorous repetition that builds muscle memory) AI is doing now. The entry ramp just got steeper even as it looks easier. 

That means mentoring matters more than it did. Not just passing down knowledge, but helping people find ways to build the experience base that the tools are quietly skipping over.

The hard part is thinking through the work, not building it.