Agreed. Thank you for this. There are days I feel on top of things and then I read linkedin and I am like damn, I need to try this new tool!
But what you say on clarity is really interesting, I am trying to brace this period as a back to school case. As you say the playing field is wide open so its just like being back at school and being open to learning anything but with the clarity of experience. For me this at least helps reducing what I chase after. Tons of people can now do data science, but building the data stack behind that is where that clarity counts
I constantly feel behind with AI and that everyone else has it figured out. What I need to remind myself is LinkedIn is no different than any other social media platform. LinkedIn "thought leaders" can curate their content to make it seem like they’ve got everything figured out. Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts on this.
This reminds me of earlier shifts that felt just as existential in the moment. At SXSW this year, Patreon founder, Jack Conte, talked about how synthesizers didn’t just add a tool they wiped out entire classes of musicians who had spent their lives mastering orchestral craft. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ue9-zkAz59A). And Marc Andreessen made a similar point on Lenny’s podcast: “calculator” used to be a job, until machines took it over completely. So both perspectives can be true, these changes are devastating at the human level, and over time they can increase the value of human labor in new forms. The hard part is we’re living in the transition, not the outcome. What feels different now is how quickly knowledge work itself is being flattened. People are clinging to “taste” as the last human moat, but that still keeps you downstream of the machine. As Will Manidis writes in his essay "Against Taste" (https://minutes.substack.com/p/against-taste) if your value is selecting or refining what AI produces, you’re still replaceable. The more durable position is upstream: deciding what should exist and bringing it into being. That shift, from being good at doing something to deciding what’s worth doing at all, is what makes this moment feel so destabilizing.
that reminds me of the linkedin post that said boomers are so frustrated, because they've gone from records > cassette tapes > cds > mp3 > streaming their music... I think each of those stages is considered a "bubble"... and people consider if AI is just that. An issue is that AI needs to be trained by humans. At Founder University's 10th Cohort kickoff at Google in Austin, Texas, Jason Calacanis asked us, "...would you rather talk to an average human or a world-class ai?" He estimated 80% chose AI. I use AI alot... maybe 100-300 prompts / month, and I've realized, I can't just prompt AI to perform functions that I'm considering--I have to input my own intelligence to control the output, otherwise, AI just outputs generic, 6-month old, average intelligence. I don't even know how its working under the hood. That's on my lists to read, but an average or most commonly occuring thread in a category is the standard machine learning response. It's like the ML joke, "A machine learning algorithm walks into a restaurant, and the waitress asks what it wants to eat, and it says, 'what is everyone else having?'" Anyway, my point is, there's a lot of room for training. It's like Elon said about fossil fuel, "We'll need to depend on fossil fuels for the next decade at least." Two years later Bill Gates says, "We need to achieve zero carbon emissions." We're all pushing for the Autonomous Corporate State, but the blueprint needs tons of training and access in order for us to jump to the dystopian society where there's a robot for every human+ and all the jobs are automated away and we're all living on a government living wage.
I don't know. I think we should all just take some rest and focus on what matters. For me, that's church life +work. Seeking God makes me fulfilled. Working fills my days. People are more enjoyable to me than machines. Thanks for reading my post.
Elena, you nail the trap: productivity gains get absorbed immediately; i.e. 10x faster just means 10x more expected output.
But what if that’s the wrong default? If the same work takes a fraction of the time, maybe the real question is: what needs doing that we’ve never had bandwidth for?
We have a planet to regenerate, communities to care for, systemic problems that need patient human attention. None of that pays well, not because it’s low value, but because we’ve built labour entirely around capital efficiency.
A 10x gain could be the biggest redistribution opportunity of our generation. Not just of wealth, but of human attention, toward stewardship instead of extraction.
That requires rethinking what “productive” means at a societal level. Harder conversation than tool stacks, but arguably the one that matters most. Your thought?
It’s exhausting, and I’m honestly sick of hearing about AI. It requires deep thinking, and with all the “required” meetings and “critical” issues, who actually has time to think? That’s why it was frustrating to hear during my company’s internal AI-focused training week that we’re already behind, which only added pressure to an already combustible situation. As an elder millennial, I’ll sneak in a reference. AI is being sold like a “set it and forget it” product. It’s far from that.
Elena, the things you named — taste, judgment, prioritization, orchestration — can't accumulate through reading. They come from doing, failing, and doing again. Which means even at the height of the efficiency era, taking the long way to build that foundation still matters. Maybe more than ever.
The apprenticeship reframe keeps coming back to me. Maybe we're returning to that model — not dedicating depth to one employer, but building it across employers, projects and products, successful or not. Same slow accumulation, different architecture. I think the manager of tomorrow is the one that has built things; and that hands-on foundation is what will make a new type of leader effective when the team is smaller, the hierarchy is gone, and there's nowhere to hide behind process.
I don't have it figured out either. But for now I'm using the time my ruthless efficiency buys me to savor that meal, take that walk, and take it slow. :)
I was speaking to a CISO of a 20,000 employee company (big company, smart and experience leader) and we were talking about MCP in relation to their company’s security of AI tools. Then he stopped and asked me if MCP stood for Microsoft Copilot… this isn’t a dig on that guy but more so, everyone is still figuring it out! Be patient with yourself, ask that question you don’t feel like you can ask because “everyone already knows the answer” you might not be as far behind as you think!
This perfectly captures what so many in tech are feeling but rarely say out loud - the mental model shift is far more unsettling than the tooling shift.
The real moat now is moving from execution to judgment, taste, and orchestration, and we’re all learning that in real time.
So well said. I used to feel like being a senior leader on a team was positive. That more experience = better output. Now, while I still have my gut to guide me, everything else has been democratized, flattened.
So maybe that’s it, like you said, it’s our taste and our ability to confidently make decisions about what to build or break. The execution though, that’s anyone’s game.
This article really hits the point, especially the economics part. Though the work has shifted but the compensation metrics and flow still stay the same in the industrial age. So yes, individuals now have the highest production power in the human history but only a few can make a living out of their taste + AI. Positively thinking this shift is so fundamental and underlying infrastructure will be updated eventually but we as Millennial will be the transition phrase. Well, honestly that's a relief to certain degree. We still know what's like to live a real life in the physical world, time to take that feeling back and enjoy :)
Totally agree! I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and writing about organizations, the importance of judgment, and how builders are back. Personally, I love this shift—it feels like my brain has been released from prison.
The real question now is: should we build this? That’s what we need to navigate. People with domain expertise, like me—who’ve always been the “spider in the web”—suddenly don’t need the web anymore.
I don't know if you'll see this comment Elena, but I really appreciate your honestly there. I'm feeling this as well. It is giving me a lot more empathy for what my parents were going thought in the 90's.
Fantastic write up, summarises how a lot of us are feeling right now.
I loved this: "Or maybe this is just what it feels like to live through a real industry shift while still being expected to perform like nothing has changed."
Agreed. Thank you for this. There are days I feel on top of things and then I read linkedin and I am like damn, I need to try this new tool!
But what you say on clarity is really interesting, I am trying to brace this period as a back to school case. As you say the playing field is wide open so its just like being back at school and being open to learning anything but with the clarity of experience. For me this at least helps reducing what I chase after. Tons of people can now do data science, but building the data stack behind that is where that clarity counts
I constantly feel behind with AI and that everyone else has it figured out. What I need to remind myself is LinkedIn is no different than any other social media platform. LinkedIn "thought leaders" can curate their content to make it seem like they’ve got everything figured out. Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts on this.
you are most def not alone.
This reminds me of earlier shifts that felt just as existential in the moment. At SXSW this year, Patreon founder, Jack Conte, talked about how synthesizers didn’t just add a tool they wiped out entire classes of musicians who had spent their lives mastering orchestral craft. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ue9-zkAz59A). And Marc Andreessen made a similar point on Lenny’s podcast: “calculator” used to be a job, until machines took it over completely. So both perspectives can be true, these changes are devastating at the human level, and over time they can increase the value of human labor in new forms. The hard part is we’re living in the transition, not the outcome. What feels different now is how quickly knowledge work itself is being flattened. People are clinging to “taste” as the last human moat, but that still keeps you downstream of the machine. As Will Manidis writes in his essay "Against Taste" (https://minutes.substack.com/p/against-taste) if your value is selecting or refining what AI produces, you’re still replaceable. The more durable position is upstream: deciding what should exist and bringing it into being. That shift, from being good at doing something to deciding what’s worth doing at all, is what makes this moment feel so destabilizing.
couldn't agree more. thank you for such thoughtful comment.
that reminds me of the linkedin post that said boomers are so frustrated, because they've gone from records > cassette tapes > cds > mp3 > streaming their music... I think each of those stages is considered a "bubble"... and people consider if AI is just that. An issue is that AI needs to be trained by humans. At Founder University's 10th Cohort kickoff at Google in Austin, Texas, Jason Calacanis asked us, "...would you rather talk to an average human or a world-class ai?" He estimated 80% chose AI. I use AI alot... maybe 100-300 prompts / month, and I've realized, I can't just prompt AI to perform functions that I'm considering--I have to input my own intelligence to control the output, otherwise, AI just outputs generic, 6-month old, average intelligence. I don't even know how its working under the hood. That's on my lists to read, but an average or most commonly occuring thread in a category is the standard machine learning response. It's like the ML joke, "A machine learning algorithm walks into a restaurant, and the waitress asks what it wants to eat, and it says, 'what is everyone else having?'" Anyway, my point is, there's a lot of room for training. It's like Elon said about fossil fuel, "We'll need to depend on fossil fuels for the next decade at least." Two years later Bill Gates says, "We need to achieve zero carbon emissions." We're all pushing for the Autonomous Corporate State, but the blueprint needs tons of training and access in order for us to jump to the dystopian society where there's a robot for every human+ and all the jobs are automated away and we're all living on a government living wage.
I don't know. I think we should all just take some rest and focus on what matters. For me, that's church life +work. Seeking God makes me fulfilled. Working fills my days. People are more enjoyable to me than machines. Thanks for reading my post.
Elena, you nail the trap: productivity gains get absorbed immediately; i.e. 10x faster just means 10x more expected output.
But what if that’s the wrong default? If the same work takes a fraction of the time, maybe the real question is: what needs doing that we’ve never had bandwidth for?
We have a planet to regenerate, communities to care for, systemic problems that need patient human attention. None of that pays well, not because it’s low value, but because we’ve built labour entirely around capital efficiency.
A 10x gain could be the biggest redistribution opportunity of our generation. Not just of wealth, but of human attention, toward stewardship instead of extraction.
That requires rethinking what “productive” means at a societal level. Harder conversation than tool stacks, but arguably the one that matters most. Your thought?
From another millennial: thank you for this !
It’s exhausting, and I’m honestly sick of hearing about AI. It requires deep thinking, and with all the “required” meetings and “critical” issues, who actually has time to think? That’s why it was frustrating to hear during my company’s internal AI-focused training week that we’re already behind, which only added pressure to an already combustible situation. As an elder millennial, I’ll sneak in a reference. AI is being sold like a “set it and forget it” product. It’s far from that.
Elena, the things you named — taste, judgment, prioritization, orchestration — can't accumulate through reading. They come from doing, failing, and doing again. Which means even at the height of the efficiency era, taking the long way to build that foundation still matters. Maybe more than ever.
The apprenticeship reframe keeps coming back to me. Maybe we're returning to that model — not dedicating depth to one employer, but building it across employers, projects and products, successful or not. Same slow accumulation, different architecture. I think the manager of tomorrow is the one that has built things; and that hands-on foundation is what will make a new type of leader effective when the team is smaller, the hierarchy is gone, and there's nowhere to hide behind process.
I don't have it figured out either. But for now I'm using the time my ruthless efficiency buys me to savor that meal, take that walk, and take it slow. :)
Agreed! we need to design our career like a net, not a corporate ladder.
I was speaking to a CISO of a 20,000 employee company (big company, smart and experience leader) and we were talking about MCP in relation to their company’s security of AI tools. Then he stopped and asked me if MCP stood for Microsoft Copilot… this isn’t a dig on that guy but more so, everyone is still figuring it out! Be patient with yourself, ask that question you don’t feel like you can ask because “everyone already knows the answer” you might not be as far behind as you think!
This perfectly captures what so many in tech are feeling but rarely say out loud - the mental model shift is far more unsettling than the tooling shift.
The real moat now is moving from execution to judgment, taste, and orchestration, and we’re all learning that in real time.
Dig into it and no workflow is changing anyone’s life unless you’re making a living from claiming so
So well said. I used to feel like being a senior leader on a team was positive. That more experience = better output. Now, while I still have my gut to guide me, everything else has been democratized, flattened.
So maybe that’s it, like you said, it’s our taste and our ability to confidently make decisions about what to build or break. The execution though, that’s anyone’s game.
This article really hits the point, especially the economics part. Though the work has shifted but the compensation metrics and flow still stay the same in the industrial age. So yes, individuals now have the highest production power in the human history but only a few can make a living out of their taste + AI. Positively thinking this shift is so fundamental and underlying infrastructure will be updated eventually but we as Millennial will be the transition phrase. Well, honestly that's a relief to certain degree. We still know what's like to live a real life in the physical world, time to take that feeling back and enjoy :)
Totally agree! I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and writing about organizations, the importance of judgment, and how builders are back. Personally, I love this shift—it feels like my brain has been released from prison.
The real question now is: should we build this? That’s what we need to navigate. People with domain expertise, like me—who’ve always been the “spider in the web”—suddenly don’t need the web anymore.
Thank you Elena!
I don't know if you'll see this comment Elena, but I really appreciate your honestly there. I'm feeling this as well. It is giving me a lot more empathy for what my parents were going thought in the 90's.
i see you Courntey.
Fantastic write up, summarises how a lot of us are feeling right now.
I loved this: "Or maybe this is just what it feels like to live through a real industry shift while still being expected to perform like nothing has changed."
I agree, as another millennial in tech. I wrote something similar recently: https://mariamte.substack.com/p/everyone-is-writing-about-ai-im-a?r=31ru9u