Work only I can do
My entire strategy is to do the work only I can do.
Work that can’t be taught. Work that requires some unique combination of my skills, opinions, tastes, and experiences. Work that without me, wouldn’t get done.
Everyone’s talking about AI replacing jobs, automating work, making developers obsolete. The discourse is exhausting. Half the people are panicking, the other half are in denial, and nobody seems to be asking the right question.
The question isn’t whether AI can write code. It can. The question is whether AI can do your work.
If your work is following established patterns, implementing well-understood solutions, or translating requirements into predictable outputs. Yes, that’s going to get automated. It should get automated. That’s not a threat, it’s just what happens when something becomes routine.
But the work that sits at the intersection of your specific experiences, your particular way of seeing problems, your accumulated context, the opinions you’ve formed from making mistakes, that’s different. That’s the work that moves things forward in ways that weren’t possible before you showed up.
AI can generate code. It can’t decide what’s worth building. It can’t know which shortcuts are smart and which ones will haunt you. It can’t weigh trade-offs through the lens of having seen this exact thing blow up before. It can’t have taste.
The hard part isn’t identifying this work. The hard part is being honest about whether you’re actually doing it. The hard part is saying no to everything else. The hard part is resisting the pull to stay busy with work that feels productive but could be done by anyone—or anything—with the same instructions.
I’m not always good at this. I still catch myself doing work that doesn’t need me. But when I do manage to focus on the work only I can do, everything else gets clearer. The decisions get easier. The direction becomes obvious.
Because if you’re not doing the work only you can do, what exactly are you doing?