The Fork

There's a fork in the road happening right now - AI native on one side, everyone else on the other. It's causing me some discomfort.

A year ago - despite what the tech bros would incessantly yammer - the gap was quite small. A few tools, some prompting tricks, nothing you couldn't pick up a taster of in a weekend if you were curious.

Now the delta is widening in ways that feel harder to close. It's not just about knowing the prompts anymore - it's about thinking in systems, orchestrating agents, being able to unbundle a web of tools, knowing what questions to even ask.

I had a conversation last week that made this feel less abstract.

Someone talented asked me about working together. I found myself hesitating. Not because of their ability, but because the work I'm doing now needs someone who can run this stuff better than I can. That's a strange new sentence for me.

In fact, scratch that. I wasn't hesitating. Subconsciously, I already knew it was a no.

If they aren't AI native (or fluent, at least), I can do 80% of what they'd be doing in 20% of the time.

I didn't feel good about thinking that. Not at all.

This isn't about me being great. It's about the total shift in the mindset, approach, fluency, of how you harness this stuff - and what that adds up to.

I don't know what the bridge looks like for people on the other side of the fork. They're not less talented. They just got there later.

Maybe I'm wrong about all of this. I'd like to be.