Everyone keeps asking whether AI is going to replace the people who make things. From where I sit, that’s the wrong question.
I use it constantly - to draft, to cut, to write code I’d otherwise be waiting days for. It’s the fastest collaborator I’ve ever worked with, and easily the most literal.
Which is the whole catch. AI does what you ask, not what you meant. Hand it a vague brief and it gives you a confident, polished version of your own confusion - faster than you could have made it yourself.
So it hasn’t made the thinking easier. If anything it’s pushed the hard part earlier. The bottleneck was never the typing or the rendering. It was knowing what you actually wanted, and being able to tell good from nearly-good.
That’s the part it can’t hand you. Taste, judgment, the call about what to keep and what to throw out - those still belong to a person who cares how it turns out.
Fifteen years in live news taught me that clarity is decided up front, not patched in at the end. AI hasn’t changed that rule. It’s just made it more obvious, and a lot more expensive to ignore.
The people getting the most out of these tools aren’t the fastest at prompting. They’re the ones who already knew what good looked like.