This is the question underneath all the other questions. Usually nobody asks it out loud, but it's there. Is this thing going to make me redundant? And quieter still: even if it doesn't — should I feel a bit weird about leaning on it this much? I think about both a lot. Here's where I've landed, for now.
🧰 Tools move the work — they don't remove the person
Every useful tool in history did some of the work people used to do by hand, and the people moved up to the part that needed judgement. AI is a big one of those, but it's the same shape. It's astonishingly good at the doing — drafting, sorting, summarising, first attempts. It's hopeless at the deciding: what matters, what's true, what's tasteful, what's right for this customer, in this moment, in this town. That part is still, stubbornly, you.
👤 The human is still in the room
Everything I've built with it has needed me at every turn — to spot what's wrong, to know what good looks like, to carry the context it doesn't have, to be the one actually accountable for the result. It made me faster. It did not make me optional. If your work is mostly judgement, relationships, taste and responsibility, you're not being replaced — you're being handed a very fast assistant.
⚖️ The honest part: some tasks will go
I'm not going to pretend nothing changes. Specific tasks — the rote, repetitive ones — will increasingly get handed off. That's real, and worth being clear-eyed about. But tasks and jobs aren't the same thing. From what I can see, the people who do well are the ones who let it take the boring tasks so they can do more of the part only they can do — not the ones who pretend it isn't happening.
💭 So — should I feel weird about it?
This is the bit I actually wrestle with. I hate being on a screen. The irony of using a screen-tool to escape screens is not lost on me. The line I hold is this: I want to be a creator with it, not a consumer of it. Use it to make things, to buy back time, to get off the laptop and build the wall in the garden and be there for my kids — not to outsource my thinking until there's nothing of me left in the work. That tension is healthy. The day it stops feeling like a question is the day to start worrying.
🌱 Where I've landed
Let it do the doing. Keep the deciding. Spend the time you get back on the things a machine can't want for you. It isn't coming for the part of your work that makes it yours — as long as you keep showing up for that part. That's the whole deal. And honestly? It's a good one.