The best way to figure out how things work is to take it apart and see. Now, if it’s a $10,000 engine, you might want to start with a lawnmower (apply common sense). But the best way to see how code runs, to see how art is created, to see what it takes to finish a book… Has always been to take it apart and do it.
In school, this was the phrase you would hear from a teacher as they walked the room while you were doing “Independent” work – “Head Down, Do your own work.” You don’t need to check up on what everyone else is doing to see if you’re ahead or behind. You just need to keep your head down and do your own work.
Why am I writing more code than I have in the past year? It’s not dead, it’s evolving. Every job goes through the same thing. Doctors use way more robotics now than they did 15 years ago. But they are still saving lives. A fundamental shift is happening in the world of technology, but you’re not dead, unless you choose to be.
We’ve had copilots forever. They were called your team. But maybe you didn’t treat them as well as you do your agentic AI copilots. That’s not a technology problem. That’s a leadership problem. And AI will only be able to fix it for so long (or make it look like it’s fixing it).
You might have an idea of what a market wants, but you won’t ever truly know until you put your work out there and see if the market bites. You can put out feelers, demos, and trials, but in the end, what only matters is what will come after that work. What you might find is that you have to build your market, and that might be the trickiest scenario of it all, because then…