I use AI as a thought partner more than anything. And I have to confess, my struggle has not reduced with its sophistication. A serious back and forth gets exhausting at times, enough to make me wonder if the hype around frontier models is worth it. Or maybe my adaptability to the intelligence available to me has something to do with it.
But if I look past that momentary frustration, it has been a major enabler. An enabler, not a magic bullet.
And that friction is the point. The back and forth is where the thinking happens.
I sense another pattern emerging, though, and it is far more troubling, because it affects the foundation of a knowledge economy.
An email arrives, polished and well structured, every point carefully qualified. It reads like a lawyer wrote it. Sometimes that is the intent. Say many things without saying anything. Is the sender worried, or just being careful?
A strategy document takes an afternoon. Having a plan used to say something about how much thinking had gone into it. It says less now. The skill is in how well you can make it your own.
Ask for ten ideas and you get ten, ready to present. Where does originality stand in that? Many of them start to look alike. The one new idea in the room still has to compete with nine that sound just as good. I can look at a slide now and often guess which model created it, and then wonder what level of thinking went into it.
Vibe coding has made it easy to build something that runs. It also means a lot more things now look like products. The distance between something that runs and something that can be owned, supported and trusted has not shrunk much. It has just become easier to overlook.
I am calling out four easy places, but you might notice it in many others. The same paradox sits underneath: as producing good-looking work gets easier, judging what is actually good gets harder.
The finished thing used to carry some evidence of the thinking behind it. That premium is rapidly reducing. The thinking is still the hard part. It has just stopped being visible.
I have been on that side of it myself. I have had a slide made that certainly carried my conviction, but not my vocabulary, and then failed to articulate it well in my own language when presenting.
And the collateral debt shows up later. When the emails going back and forth are that hedged, the decision is the casualty. A plan nobody made their own gets executed anyway. Originality is lost in a barrage of sophisticated arguments. And the case for a well designed product gets less compelling when you can simply prototype with intent.
I do not think the answer is to slow any of this down. In fact, I would like it to accelerate, and how to do that well is something I am still internalizing.
What does it mean to put your name on something that took five minutes? When is polish a courtesy, and when is it a hedge?
The bar for producing came down quickly. The bar for judgment has to come up just as fast.
Love this post!
This is also where identifying quality talent within the team becomes more challenging. While you can at several times differentiate whether an artifact, plan, presentation was put together using AI tooling, the line is getting thinner and thinner especially when everyone expects everyone to be using these tools!
How much thought and experience actually went into producing something becomes a genuine question when a lot is being produced by AI and at times also being reviewed by it at higher levels in organisations.
In my opinion, this is where leadership and real strategic thinking becomes key to be successful in the longer run!