A while back I wrote about why the real problem with AI isn’t unemployment but de-skilling. Which leaves the question of what to do about it.
While everyone’s afraid of being replaced by artificial intelligence and put out of work, I see the far bigger problem somewhere else. We lose two things. First, the ability to truly understand something and act on it. Second, the curiosity to try something new and build from it something no AI has computed yet.
Because there’s still a human who starts the whole thing. For now, at least.
So if you want to do well over the next few years, use AI as well as you can — but deliberately, as a tool. Don’t keep hitting Yes every time it suggests something. Take the time to actually understand it.
And not only that. Write the plans, the decisions, the insights — yours and the AI’s — into a separate system. A second brain. While the code runs, get away from your desk. Take a sheet of paper and recap what just happened. What you decided, and why. Build it, write it, draw it.
If you’ve got a whiteboard, scribble on it. Try explaining it not just to yourself but to someone else. What matters is that you grasp it, not just understand it. In German we say begreifen — and the word literally means to take hold of something with your hands. Not the “yeah, got it” that’s gone five seconds later.
When you lose your job
Because should you lose your job — even though you’ve worked your way so beautifully into the AI tools — you’ll be up against everyone else who can do the same, just as fast. Probably faster. Your only chance is that you genuinely understand what’s going on.
You’ll start at companies sitting on half-finished AI projects, stuck. They’ll expect you to look at the processes and the work so far and actually grasp it. You don’t need to write code. You need to set the right impulses — without disappearing for a few hours to go and do it with Claude Code.
Even in the job interview it won’t be enough to say you built this product or that one. Anyone can now. What matters is the story: why you built it, and what you learned along the way.
At least that’s what I’d hope for from a sensible interviewer. Though I’ve no idea how AI-savvy your average person from HR actually is.
First appeared in German on reinergaertner.de, my blog since 1997. AI-assisted translation — because life’s too short to translate 150 posts by hand, but too long to leave them in German.