I’m wrapping up my next workshop which I’m calling The AI Pro that gets into the more "advanced" uses of AI in everyday work. Things like:

• Metaprompting (having Claude write your prompts for you).
• Discovery (Q&A sessions to find out what you don’t know).
• Planning and Recap documents so you can "keep the receipts" for your AI use.
• Advanced tooling. Things like custom agents, path-based instructions, stored prompts and Claude skills as well as how they all work together.

Creating workshops like this is extremely fun, and it’s why I do what I do. It’s a process of learning and discovery, as well as sharing some of the skills I’ve picked up over the years. The Plan and Recap documents, for example, make working with AI tools so much simpler!

I should be done in the next week or two, and I decided that I would extend the holiday discount** another week** for those who haven’t signed up yet. It’s a pretty good deal, as it will be $50 or so less than the price of this workshop alone.

Anyway - as much fun as I’m having, I do have more sober moments, however, when I realize just how much AI can do for you when your system is dialed in. When your instructions, custom agents, and stored prompts are tuned up proper... it’s kind of unnerving to see how productive you can be. More than unnerving, actually, it’s almost worrisome.

What role do I play in all of this?

I was thinking about this today and thought I would share some of my thoughts with you.

Any Tool, In the Wrong Hands

I was working at a clownshow startup on contract back in August of this year (2025), and as part of the onboarding process I had to learn their "AI policy". It was straightforward (paraphrased):

We use AI and we expect you to do so as well. We recognize the efficiency gains using AI, but we also recognize the risks if AI does too much. To that end: you are responsible for everything AI creates on your behalf. "It’s AI’s fault" is never an excuse.

In short: use AI, but don’t tell us you did. This split-brained approach to using AI is common for programmers, and the default for their managers.

My contract with the clownshow startup ended because of this problem. I was given a task that AI is perfect for, so I used it (I’m keeping the details to myself on this) and made sure I proofed what was created. As expected, I found a few issues and fixed them, and I also added content that I felt was missing.

The next day I was confronted in a meeting:

Them: Did you use AI to create this? Me: Of course. It’s pretty mundane material, why wouldn’t I? Claude will do a better job of it anyway. I was careful to review it- Them: Well I could tell that it’s generated and your review skills need some work. This middle section is clearly Claude’s work and incorrect. This is why we have an AI policy, Rob, because we can’t let things like this slip through. Me: Ironically, that’s the part I wrote myself and researched for 3 hours. It is, in fact, accurate as it came right from the source and shows work done recently which- Them: Oh. Well it looks generated and that’s all it takes, you know. You can see why I thought it was AI and if I thought it was AI... Me: ... Them: I’ll fix this up so it reads better. Me: Do what you need to do I guess. I wrote it 100% by hand...

The contract ended, mercifully, 4 days after this meeting. I remember asking them why they used AI at all if they were so afraid of it (because of course I did), and received a blank stare in return.

People are weird.

I Love It. I Hate It. Help.

I am sure I am not alone in this experience. Our managers, colleagues, and the industry in general are working with a mind-boggling tool that no one asked for. Managers and executives love the idea because it increases efficiency. They also **hate the idea because it increases risk **due to copyright issues, crappy code, and overall misuse.

I love using tools like Claude because I can pump out boilerplate code just the way I want. I can also explore different ideas and come up with a development plan that helps me write code faster and test things in a more efficient way. Or, I should say, I think about the tests I want written and let Claude do the rest.

That’s OK, isn’t it?

This is where I struggle. I love the process of getting inspired, wondering if something will work, and then giving it a try. There is no better feeling than seeing your idea come to life and actually working! I remember feeling this with SubSonic, an open source data access tool I created back in 2004. I had an idea at 7PM as I was reading my kids a bedtime story, and by 11Pm I had the prototype working, giggling to myself for hours.

What a rush! It’s why I do what I do. Claude, however, could have put that together in a matter of minutes. This is OK too, but would it feel the same then?

Imagine if you could have Harry Potter or Hermione Granger powers for a day and you could *apparate *(teleport) anywhere you choose, right now. Sounds fun, doesn’t it? Where would you go? What would you do?

Here’s a better question: would it be the same if you didn’t make the journey to get there? As Steve Jobs said (paraphrasing Taoist philosophy):

The journey is the reward.

The process of finding out is the fun part. It’s what you learn along the way through discovery and overcoming obstacles both external (code, logic) and internal (feeling like an imposter, you’re not smart enough, etc.).

That said, if I never have to fly in an airplane again I would probably be happy, and sitting on a beach in Belize for lunch sounds even better...

Not a Zero Sum Game

I think there’s a happy middle ground here. If I had Harry’s powers for a day, I might skip a few parts of my journey that I had done before. I might skip that connecting flight to SFO, or the Uber ride to the airport, and anything that involved sitting for hours in a cramped seat next to a smelly person. These are things I’ve done hundreds of times and doing them again doesn’t add to the journey.

In the same way, writing Yet Another Drizzle Schema or create table users(... statement isn’t something that fires me up. Documenting a class, writing a ToString() override or an optional constructor method that takes an object for property settings... yeah I’ve done that far too many times. In fact, I have snippets to get around these things.

We tend to automate the boring or simpler things, which I think is OK.

This made me think about the automotive industry, and how the use of robotics disrupted just about everything in the 1970s and 80s. There are have been a number of economic studies done on this shift, and they all tend to agree with this MIT study :

Improvements in technology adversely affect wages and employment through the displacement effect, in which robots or other automation complete tasks formerly done by workers. Technology also has more positive productivity effects by making tasks easier to complete or creating new jobs and tasks for workers. The researchers said automation technologies always create both displacement and productivity effects, but robots create a stronger displacement effect.

So, in short, jobs are lost. They are also created because you have to take care of the robots and support the tasks they do.

Not all jobs are equal, however. Managers that can increase margins will do so, *especially *if they can trim their staff down. This, typically, means the more "disposable" workforce:

...the automotive industry has adopted robots more than other sectors, and workers who are lower and middle income, perform manual labor, and live in the Rust Belt and Texas are among those most likely to have their work affected by robots.

It would be silly to think AI won’t cost jobs. You could argue that the rise of AI in the tech industry is different than that of robotics in the automotive industry, but that would be splitting hairs at best. Automation will replace programmers and I don’t think there’s a way around that. Automation will also demand programmers so that it works optimally, so I suppose the lesson here is straightforward: adapt, and learn you some AI.

Same As It Ever Was

I have lived through a good amount of disruption in my life:

• The web changed business as we know it.
• Google, together with the rise of blogs and dedicated programming sites like StackOverflow, increased developer efficiency dramatically.
• Twitter and social media expanded your professional network.
• Smart phones let us carry work with us, everywhere.

I liked the 1990s a lot, but I have no idea how I would function if I somehow traveled back in time to 1992. If you were going to be late and needed to let someone know, you pulled over and used a payphone. We carried a thick book of maps under our car seats (Thomas Guides) so we knew where we were going. If we were bored, we were just... bored. Going for walks, shooting hoops, calling a friend or playing a video game on our Sega Genesis.

That is one hell of a shift in 30 years, and it’s going to keep shifting. AI will change things, of course, but we’ll adapt because that’s what humans do. This is why I like surfing so much: it’s a practice of adapting to the environment around you in a constant, ever-changing way. No wave is ever the same, and your experience at that moment will also never be the same. The light of the sun, the sky, the wind, the smell of the air and ocean... it’s a singular event never to be repeated.

The only thing you can do is to just ride along and enjoy the constant change. Try and fight it, and you fall off. AI is going to change our work, some for the better, some for the worse. We can fight it all we like, but it won’t change a thing. Or we can go with it and adapt, and ideally save space for ourselves in this new, wild industry that we work in every day.

Thanks for reading, as always! Leave a comment on the post or hit reply...

Rob