So I think the market is shifting.
We're shifting from knowledge work being radically transformed
with tools like Claude Code being reimagined for knowledge
workers with Claude Co work. And we're now moving into an era
where skill sets such as managing AI tools that are doing
work for you is more important than just using the tool itself.
And this big change brings with it brand new skill sets.
And I think these skill sets are going to be incredibly important
for you at work, your family, your colleagues.
Because right now, January hiring and firing data in the US
looks quite painful. It was the worst since 2009,
with companies openly saying that they're removing and firing
people as a result of AI. In today's episode, I'm going to
talk about the exact skill sets that I think are critical for
you to learn. Judgement, taste, delegation.
I'm going to talk about frameworks for deciding when to
use AI or when to hand the work off to AI, and ultimately what
you can practically do about this massive change.
This is in the loop with Jack Horton.
I hope you enjoy the show. So let's start with what skills
I think are now really important.
Now, Ethan Molik did a fantastic piece on all of this.
And for those who don't know him, Ethan Molik is AAI, a
researcher and professor that puts out fantastic pieces
online. I'd highly recommend to go check
him out. But he did a big deep dive into
important skill sets. His answer was fantastic.
It's very, very simple. It's management.
Not management in the sense of sitting in meetings and, you
know, reviewing slide decks. Management in the way of
describing exactly what you need to give fantastic and effective
and clear feedback and design new ways of evaluating work you
get back from in this context, agents, if you're good at those
things, you're going to be able to work with agents very well.
And what I absolutely loved about this piece is that he adds
a very important nuance Management has always assumed
scarcity. You delegate because you can't
do everything yourself and because talent is very limited
and very expensive. AI completely flips this talent
is abundant and it's cheap. What's scarce and difficult all
of a sudden is knowing what to ask for and how to ask it.
And for example, senior product managers at Google mapped out
different skill sets that they believe are now critical to a
modern worker. The ability to shape a problem,
so turning vague objectives into precise, testable subtasks.
The ability to curate context, so deciding what information is
actually important for this subtask and only giving it that
context so you can get the perfect output.
Creating fantastic documentation and systems so you can get 90%
of the way there on a single attempt.
Another really important skill they labeled was another
important skill was actually ability to recognise quality.
The ability to orchestrate many, many agents, managing sequential
versus, say, parallel tasks. We'll get on to that.
The ability to understand guard rails and how to ensure agents
are performing well. Knowing when to intervene with
an agent or when to start again, and judgement about the tool
sets you're using. Understanding when to use an
agent, when to use a simple model and when just to do it
yourself. These skills aren't new really.
Yes, they apply it to AI and there's a learning curve there,
but this is one O 1 management skills.
I think the CEO of Shopify, it's a fantastic case study here.
He's GitHub commits, so the actual code that he's committed
to, Shopify's code base has gone up from 94 commits in 2024 to
over 900 in 2026 alone. You can tell he's clearly not
writing all that code himself. He's the CEO.
He's probably a busy, busy person, but he's orchestrating
and managing agents to write lots of code and get it into the
code base. It's turning a CEO of a massive
company into a builder again, because again, talent is now
cheaper and more readily available.
What matters is your ability to instruct it.
What matters is the skill sets that I'm going to go into that
ensures what you're producing is actually good quality work.
We saw this also with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
They used to have, say, a designer, a front end engineer,
a back end, a senior architect, a product manager.
And what they're doing is rolling all of that skill set
into one person and calling them a full stack builder.
Someone that can have an idea, shape it, understand the problem
they're solving, build a lot of it, and get it into a place
where others can review without relying on 18 meetings and
documents. So there's a lot of skill sets
that are emerging, are becoming increasingly important.
Another one is taste. Taste is about selection,
recognizing quality amongst many different options or directions.
If AI generates US10 versions of something, which one do you go
for? Which one is actually good?
Judgement on the other hand, is about weighting trade-offs.
It's about evaluation, especially when you don't have
complete information, you don't know necessarily the end
direction or an outcome that you're going for.
So yeah, suddenly decision making integrates all these
different skill sets of taste of judgement, of evaluation.
And then management skills is the coordination of all these
different decisions across many different agents and tools to
get more work done than ever before.
Another really important skill set here is curiosity, which I
think is arguably at the moment my key most desirable skill set.
You could have extraordinary taste, but without any agency
and curiosity, you won't create anything.
You need to be constantly asking, is there another
direction to take? Can I prompt it to explore this
direction? And if it doesn't get me
anywhere, that's fine. But then I've been curious
enough to explore it. And again, that judgement and
taste to know when it's good enough and we're ready to ship.
So someone could have extraordinary taste, but no,
let's say agency. So the ability to make a
decision, therefore you can't create anything.
You could have lots of agency, but awful judgement.
So you could move really fast, but in the wrong direction.
You could have all the curiosity in the world, but without the
ability to follow through and take action, nothing happens.
So all these skills combined suddenly become extremely
important to develop in yourself.
And we've seen these types of comments from big leaders all
over the world right now. So the Co founder of Y
Combinator, probably the most famous starter by accelerator in
the entire world, believes judgement is now the skill set
that matters. In his words, when anyone can
make anything, it's the ability to decide what to make the
counts. Greg Brockman, the president of
Open AI, said that taste is now his most important skill.
And the CTO of Cloudflare, so the thing that basically makes
the Internet work, said that taste in 2026 is now the
engineering differentiator. So yeah, I've discussed what
skills are really important now and why they're really
important. Because ultimately, as I said,
you can be a full stop builder in whatever career trajectory,
whatever career path you're currently doing, you can be a
full stop builder, someone who can produce more than anyone
else in the world. But it requires you to have
those important skill sets, to be trusted in the organization,
to actually go and do those things.
So then I think now let's move on to, I guess the equation for
when to delegate to AI. Think this is a really important
one to get started with and a really good framework of
thinking about these big questions.
Now Ethan Mollick believes it comes down to just three
variables. 1st, the human baseline of time.
So how long would a task take for you to complete?
Second, the probability of success.
How how likely is AI to give you a good answer and output?
And 3rd is AI process time. How long would it take you to
write the prompt, get the answer and evaluate the output?
Now, on the face of it, it seems quite simple, but that requires
you to have in depth understanding of the tools, how
to manage agents, what it's good at and bad at, to have stress
tested all those different avenues, and therefore to really
touch yourself into it. And the reason I'm emphasizing
this point so much about these new skill sets, the way of
deciding when to delegate or not delegate something to AI is
because of the huge amount of layoffs that are starting to
happen across the US. I'm sure the data is going to
back it up in the UK too. You know, US employers announced
over 108,000 layoffs in January, which is 120% increase year on
year. Hiring intentions fell to their
lowest level since records began and AI was cited in over 7 1/2
thousand job cuts. And although that only
represents 7% of those total jobs, I truly believe that it's
understating the impact AI is starting to have on the job
market. So what should you take away
from this episode? Well, ultimately, we're seeing a
shift from execution to direction.
And we're seeing this especially in the world of programming and
developers. But as I've said a number of
times on this podcast, it's coming for everybody.
The skills that matter now, our taste, our judgement, agency,
curiosity, and the ability to coordinate work across many
different agents. These are the sorts of tasks
that often people didn't develop in themselves because they were
so busy on executing things themselves.
Whereas now everybody is becoming a manager.
And the economic reality of this change is uneven and in places
it's going to be really unfair. I think layoffs in this next
period are probably going to be structural, not temporary, but
there are many skills that everybody must learn and
demonstrate if they're going to navigate these quite difficult
times. Nobody can fully predict what
work's going to look like, what everybody's a manager, but I
think those that will thrive are those that can describe exactly
what they need and make the perfect judgement of when it is
good enough to ship. Anyway, that's a short episode
this week on important skill sets that we're seeing emerge.
I hope you enjoyed the episode, I hope you found it useful and I
will see you next week.