The Work That AI Makes More Valuable

AI has made a lot of things easy. I even feel, for some reason, that I should get the same reward for 30 minutes of work that used to take me 5 hours. Unfortunately that’s not how it works. Value comes from scarcity, and difficulty is one of the main things that makes something scarce. The easier something is, the more people will do it, and the more abundant it becomes. Hard things stay rare. Not always, but a good amount of the time.

It’s time to adapt and put more effort into the things that are still valuable.

Quality software. Software should be performant (fast, snappy), reliable (it does what it says it does), have minimal bugs, and be beautiful and intuitive. Generating all the code in the world doesn’t give you any of that. If anything it’s now easier than ever to end up with the opposite. If you’re not careful, or you’re not a software engineer, what you build will be slow, buggy and unintuitive. It still takes years of experience to know how to build quality software.

Long time horizon. AI compresses almost everything, but it can’t compress time. 90 days is 90 days no matter how good your tools are. “You get extraordinary outcomes by doing ordinary things for extraordinary periods of time.” — Alex Hormozi. This one is really about focus. The world is full of distractions and it’s getting harder for the average person to stay on one thing, especially now that you can do everything at once.

Writing. Writing something authentic and human is something AI still struggles with, and something people still crave. My writing is 90% me and 10% AI. That 10% is fixing grammar, simplifying sentences and structure, and making things coherent. The 90% is where the value is, because writing is a thinking tool. It’s the best way I’ve found to work out what I actually think. Write and you become a clearer thinker, which makes you a better employee, a better friend, a better problem solver, a better everything.

Learning. I’ve noticed my own mind getting lazy. The more I lean on AI, the more small mistakes show up in my work. It’s very easy to outsource your learning now, and for a lot of tasks that’s exactly what you should do. Nobody needs all the rote knowledge anymore. But you’re still the one making the decision at the end, and you can’t make good decisions about work you’ve stopped understanding. Solve problems. Don’t delegate everything.

We’re still early and things change every couple of months, but these are the four things that are still differentiators.