I multi task much more now that i can farm off small coding assignments to agents. i pay hndreds per month in tokens. for my role personally its been a massive paradigm shift.
I've said this in the past and I'll continue to say it - until the tools get far better at managing context, they will be hard locked for value in most use cases. The moment I see "summarizing conversation" I know I'm about to waste 20 minutes fixing code.
If I worked on different types of systems with different types of tasks I might feel the same way as you, i think AI works well in specific targeted use cases, where some amount of hallucination can be tolerated and addressed.
What models are you using, I use opus 4.5, which can one shot a surprising ratio of tasks.
> so it the model isn't the cause
Thing is, the prompts, those stupid little bits of English that can't possiu matter all that much? It turns out they affect the models performance a ton.
I get it that some people just want to see the thing on the screen. Or your priority is to be a high status person with a loving family etc.. etc... All noble goals. I just don't feel a sense of fulfillment from a life not in pursuit of something deeper. The AI can do it better than me, but I don't really care at the end of the day. Maybe super-corp wants the AI to do it then, but it's a shame.
And yet, the Renaissance "grand masters" became known as masters through systematizing delegation:
Surely Donald Knuth and John Carmack are genuine masters though? There's the Elon Musk theory of mastery where everyone says you're great, but you hire a guy to do it, and there's the <nobody knows this guy but he's having a blast and is really good> theory where you make average income but live a life fulfilled. On my deathbed I want to be the second. (Sorry this is getting off topic.)
Steve Jobs wrote code early on, but he was never a great programmer. That didn’t diminish his impact at all. Same with plenty of people we label as "masters" in hindsight. The mastery isn’t always in the craft itself.
What actually seems risky is anchoring your identity to being the best at a specific thing in a specific era. If you're the town’s horse whisperer, life is great right up until cars show up. Then what? If your value is "I'm the horse guy," you're toast. If your value is taste, judgment, curiosity, or building good things with other people, you adapt.
So I’m not convinced mastery is about skill depth alone. It's about what survives the tool shift.
"taste, judgment, curiosity, or building good things with other people"
Taste is susceptible to turning into a vibes / popularity thing. I think success is mostly about (firstly just doing the basics like going to work on time and not being a dick), then ego, personality, presentation, etc... These things seem like unfulfilling preoccupations, not that I'm not susceptible to them like anyone else, so in my best life I wouldn't be so concerned about "success". I just want to master a craft and be satisfied in that pursuit.
I'd love to build good things with other people, but for whatever reason I've never found other people to build things with. So maybe I suck, that's a possibility. I think all I can do is settle on being the horse guy.
(I'm also not incurious about AI. I use AI to learn things. I just don't want to give everything away and become only a delegator.)
Edit: I'm genuinely terrified that AI is going to do ALL of the things, so there's not going to be a "survives the shift" except for having a likable / respectable / fearsome personality
I doubt Jobs would classify himself as a great programmer, so point being?
> So I’m not convinced mastery is about skill depth alone. It's about what survives the tool shift.
That's like saying karate masters should drop the training and just focus on the gun? It does lose meaning.