Reporting from inside the practice
A field note from a few months in. Take what fits.
I don't know about your Monday meeting where Ai changes who's in the room. I know the story you're being told about it — David gets cut, Maya gets promoted, pick one — and I don't want to buy it. How many times has "the new" turned out to be just a tool — maybe a promising one, but a tool, not a revolution? Enough that suspicion is the same default. But here's what keeps me from parking there: announcements become reality only if someone builds the reality.
The question isn't whether the memo is right — it's who's building what the memo describes, and what happens to the rest of us when they do. A year ago, no one in their right mind would have predicted that senior knowledge work itself would be up for reorganization this fast. It's closer to a black swan than a trend. The rules have changed mid-match and nobody has explained them — they're being written, in real time, by the people choosing to build inside the new rules instead of waiting to see.
For a few months now I've been learning to manage Ai as a day job. Not as a side tool — as the actual collaborator I work with, hour by hour. I'm doing it as a solo, which makes the seams visible: what I hand over well, what collapses into noise when I hand the wrong piece, what I have to keep framing myself because the thing I'm asking for doesn't exist in language yet. That's the practice I'm reporting from inside.
I think the story being told about David gets the data right and the conclusion backwards. David isn't obsolete. He's mis-positioned. Maya's advantage over him is speed with the tool. His advantage over Maya is twenty years of knowing what good looks like — and that turns out to be what Ai is missing on its own. David's move isn't to out-Maya Maya. It's to take the position Ai is making newly available: the person with intent — the one who knows what the work is for — who learns to co-think, co-create, and manage this new collaborator with that intent intact. It's a learnable practice. I'm learning it because solo work doesn't leave the option of waiting.
I don't know your experience. I can tell you mine: half of it still doesn't work, and the other half does things I couldn't have done eighteen months ago. I'm reporting from where I stand. You'll know what fits your Monday.
Catch you next time.
— Ambròs
Co-created with Ai. The judgment is mine.