Everyone becomes a bit of an engineer

Almost everyone who gets serious about AI eventually becomes a bit of an engineer.

People who never thought of themselves as technical start taking their own work apart.

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• What are the inputs?
• Where does judgment enter?
• What does a good output look like?
• Which exceptions matter?
• How should the process run next time?

This is also why the corporate obsession with AI use cases is approaching a dead end.

When building was expensive, selecting a small number of use cases made sense. Now almost every recurring piece of knowledge work can be redesigned. The list gets longer while telling us less.

The real capability is emerging underneath: people close to the work learning to describe it, test it and gradually engineer a better version of it. The company's job is to give them the tools, guardrails and ownership to keep going.

The industrialization of knowledge work may arrive this way - through thousands of small acts of engineering by people who never called themselves engineers.