There is a phrase in the tech industry that has been repeated at this stage so many times by so many different people that it has become a meme by itself, something like: “You don't lose your job to AI but to a developer who uses AI.”
I get it: everyone should be using AI by this stage (and in my circle, it seems that everyone does), but in my experience, the previous phrase misses the whole point, or doesn’t really make one. I believe the phase of people refusing to use AI is over. Sure, there are some rare cases where someone somewhere does not want to touch anything AI-related, but the majority of people, one way or another, are using AI. What’s next, then? What differentiates employees?
We had a phase where people argued that the most important skill is prompt engineering, knowing when to use n-shot prompting, when to use chain of thought, etc. but in my opinion, even that is over, or will be over soon. Models (and especially reasoning models) are getting better and better at recognizing intent. So what's left?
In my opinion, the thing that emerges naturally is a new, weird meta-skill: choosing what to let the machines do and what to hold close as human work. I am calling it a meta-skill because it kind of requires that you already have the main skill. The meta-skill is what's left when tools can do half the "skills" we used to do ourselves. It’s like the skill above skills, the conductor rather than the violinist.
If you are a copywriter, you need to have the meta-skill to choose which text to produce with AI and which not, and still have the "taste" for filtering both human (your own) and AI-produced text. If you are a software engineer, you need to have the meta-skill to choose for which task you can trust AI and for which you have to really do it yourself, where to review thoroughly and where to let AI review. If you are a product manager, you need the meta-skill to decide which of the 10 ideas AI suggests is worth chasing, if any.
AI dramatically accelerates the pace of change and obsolescence, making the responsibility for proactive adaptation solely the individual's. It's "You, Inc" (or "Du GmbH") 10x. As hard as it sounds this means constantly reskilling and upskilling yourself before the market forces you to do it, you cannot wait for your employer to train you. I know it doesn’t sound nice, but I am not here to write some honeyed words.
