It isn’t the tool, but the hands: why the AI displacement narrative gets it backwards
Responding to Matt Shumer's "Something Big Is Happening" piece that's been circulating. The pace of change is real, but the "just give it a prompt" framing is self-defeating. If the prompt is all that matters, then knowing what to build and understanding the problem deeply matters MORE. Building simple shit is getting commoditized, fine. But building complex systems and actually understanding how they work? That's becoming more valuable, not less. When anyone can spin up the easy stuff, the premium shifts to the people who can architect what's hard and debug what's opaque. We also need to separate "building software" from "building AI systems", completely different trajectories. The former may be getting commoditized. The latter is not. How we use this technology, how we shape it, what we ...








