Real builders ask for help. Get your hands dirty, AI won't judge.

I recently gave a talk to a collection of senior IT professionals. On AI, of course, because everything is about AI these days. I talked a lot about things I and my small prototyping team are doing at Microsoft, and made the point they should really be hands on themselves. This isn’t new - Ethan Mollick has been saying the same for a while now.

What I did say to them was a bit new: I told them to get some code built. That sounds scary and hard - you might not even understand what code is or how it works or what language to use or what tool … these are all great questions for your infinitely patient, supremely talented, highly skilled coding assistant/teacher also known as AI. Start at the beginning and be curious. Have it help you when there are problems. Dump error codes in directly and have it debug, etc.

The point of this isn’t to make more coders (in fact, I think we will see less code even though more of it will be created, as this progresses). It’s to teach what I think is actually the core skill of the new era: the ability to create.

But not any kind of creation. Rote creation, where you are following something that is known, isn’t going to be much of a valuable skill because you’ll be able to just ask in a high leverage way - think about things like “Summarize this meeting”. No one is making a living being a “summarize this meeting asker of AI”. The creation that is more interesting and valuable is where you have to navigate some new idea space in a novel and iterative way. You have a goal and you use the AI as a tool to help achieve it, with yourself as the center of agency and decisions as you go.

I recently visited Japan and met a number of very highly skilled and accomplished artisans. One common thread is that they build and shape their own tools, constantly. You might think that someone at their level would have an apprentice do that, with their resources would just buy ready-made tools, but the practice of tool making is seen as essential to the overall process. You can’t understand and modify what you haven’t built yourself.

It’s a little hard to describe precisely the sense of “maker agency” that I am getting at here. Good engineers and artists that I know always have it. They’re always poking at things, trying things, coming up with funny goals and then pursuing them, making messes along the way. This sense of creating, exploring, building, modifying and owning is going to be critical in the age of AI.

When I told that group of professionals to do this, most of them looked like I said they should subside on a diet of live frogs for the next month. I doubt any of them did it. Most of them probably delegate things like this to their teams. It’s dangerous to do this. I can see already with my own teams and co-workers, that there are folks who are curious and see AI as tools, and folks who are hanging back and doing things the old way, and the former are absolutely pulling ahead.

Don’t be afraid to try things. Most of us hesitate to ask for help because it’s embarrassing. But that assumption has changed! Now you have someone you can ask for all the help in the world, be as dumb as you like, and they’ll never judge, get tired or be frustrated - they’ll just help you. Break free of the habit of being shy about asking for help and ask the AI to help you all day long.

(I may or may not write next week - I’ll be out travelling, and busy, so I might not have time. But I’ll probably have inspiration, so…who knows?)