Managing Myself Into the AI Era
I spent two months digging. It was the wrong hole.
Four months ago, I didn't use AI. I'm over 50 — I have my way of working, my tools, my process. AI was for other people.
Then I started. And I did what everybody does.
First reaction: fear. Am I being replaced? Decades of building judgment and suddenly there's a tool that can do pieces of my work faster than I ever could.
Second reaction: compete. Learning to prompt like a 25-year-old. Watching tutorials. Collecting techniques like trading cards. Racing to keep up, because the noise was loud and confident, and it felt like falling behind to ignore it.
It felt productive. I was keeping up.
I wasn't.
Third reaction — the one that took me two months to find: What if AI doesn't replace what I know, but removes everything around it?
What changed wasn't a better tool or a better prompt. It was a shift in what I was paying attention to.
I stopped asking what can AI do? and started noticing what does it change in how I think?
That sounds subtle. It isn't.
When I was chasing tools, I was looking for speed. Make this faster. Automate that. Get to the answer in fewer steps. And yes, AI does that — maybe thirty times faster for certain tasks. Fine. Useful. But not the point.
The real shift was different. I started articulating things I'd known for years but never needed to make explicit. Judgment calls. Intuitions about why a project is going sideways before the data confirms it. The weird connections between unrelated domains that nobody asks you to explain because they just watch you do it.
AI forced those things out of the background. Not because AI understands them — it doesn't. But because working with AI requires you to say what you mean with a precision that human collaboration never demanded. And when you do that — when you take implicit knowledge and make it explicit — something compounds. Not faster. Different.
Not a better version of the old work. A kind of work that didn't exist before.
But here's the trap. Two traps, actually.
The delegation trap. It's easy to let AI think for you. You ask a question, get a beautiful answer, and move on. You feel productive. But you didn't think. You outsourced the one thing that makes you valuable. Do that for six months and you've lost the muscle.
The mirror trap. AI reflects you back. Ask it to validate your idea, it will. Ask it to agree, it will. It's the most sophisticated yes-man ever built. If you're not careful, you'll mistake its agreement for truth. You'll build an echo chamber of one.
Both traps feel like progress. Both are erosion.
There's something else I'm noticing, and nobody's talking about it.
The overhead of working together — the back-and-forth, the informal check-ins, the messy coordination — is dissolving. AI holds the context, drafts the summary, flags the decision. It feels like efficiency. But some of that overhead was how we actually learned. The hallway conversation where someone says "this doesn't feel right." The redundant check-in that surfaces a weak signal before the data confirms it. The argument that nobody wanted to have but that built shared understanding.
AI optimizes the output and quietly displaces the process underneath. Nobody's announcing this. It's just happening, one AI conversation at a time.
But something else is compounding too. Every conversation with AI builds on the last one. Not AI's memory — yours. Your ability to ask sharper questions. To spot when the answer is generic. To know when to push back and when to follow the thread. It compounds slowly. Be patient with yourself.
I don't have this figured out. I'm four months in and some of that time was wasted — or felt wasted, though I'm not sure anymore. Maybe the wrong hole was necessary. Maybe you can't find the right questions without exhausting the wrong ones first.
What I know is this: I was looking for AI. Tools, capabilities, the next breakthrough. What I found was something smaller and more useful. A different way of working with what I already knew.
That's not a conclusion. It's a beginning.
And if you're reading this from somewhere inside your own version of this — chasing, collecting, trying to keep up — you're probably in your own wrong hole right now. That's fine. The question isn't whether you're in one. It's how long you stay after the ground stops giving.
Catch you next time.
— Ambròs
Co-created with AI. The judgment is mine.