TL;DR AI Isn’t Taking Your Job. You’re Just Refusing to Pick Up the New Tools.
In 1996 I’m a temp at an advertising agency in Cleveland. I get sent there through a staffing company called MacTemps to fill in for a typesetter who’s out for surgery. Typical gig. Show up Monday, get handed a stack of job jackets with floppy and Zip disks, do the work, hand in the jackets. One week.
On Friday, another typesetter has a skiing accident. They ask me to stay a second week. That next Monday I meet the woman I’d replaced and we get to talking. She’s been tasked with networking the entire office and has no idea what to do with the quotes she’s getting. I tell her I know a lot about that. (I know a little.) I spend the week helping.
The husband and wife who own the agency are in Florida…late December in Northeast Ohio, that’s just what you do if you can. By the time they get back, this new kid named Doug has networked their entire office and moved everyone from job jackets and Zip disks to shared folders and network printing. I later find out the quotes they’d been getting for the networking were $15-20K. I did it for my temp rate plus about $400 in cabling from the electrical supply store.
They hire me full-time. I spend the next four years there. And during those years, I watched something happen that I’ve never forgotten.
The Drafting Tables
There are five Art Directors. Three of them are using their computers and Adobe Illustrator. Two of them…including the Senior Art Director…are still using their drafting tables.
The Senior Art Director’s workflow goes like this: sketch the layout by hand on the drafting table with stencils and rulers, hand it to a junior designer, and have them scan it in and digitize it. The junior designer traces the work, vectorizes it, cleans it up, and produces the final digital file. The Senior Art Director never touches the computer.
I try everything. Wacom tablets. Plotters. I sit with them and walk through tracing their own scans. I show them how the tools replicate exactly what they’re doing on paper, just faster and with the ability to iterate without starting over.
None of it matters. They will not give up those drafting tables, stencils, and rulers. The tools are right there. The tools are better. And they refuse to pick them up.
Three years later, they’re so far behind that they have no choice. The industry has moved. The clients expect digital deliverables. The junior designers who learned Illustrator on day one are now running circles around them. The Senior Art Director isn’t senior anymore…he’s the bottleneck.
This Is Happening Again
I’ve spent the last month going deep on AI agents. Not as a curiosity. As a daily workflow. I’m writing real code, managing real projects, building real products…and I’m doing it with AI as a force multiplier on 30 years of software engineering and team management experience.
The learning curve is real. The first few weeks are clunky. The tools aren’t perfect. The code that comes out isn’t always clean. You have to know enough to evaluate what the AI gives you, refactor the rough spots, and steer it in the right direction. It’s not magic. It’s a tool that requires skill to use well.
But it’s getting better at a pace that should make anyone paying attention sit up straight. The code AI was writing this time last year was sloppy. Look at what’s happened in the last six months. The last 90 days. Where do you think this is all headed?
It’s 1996 all over again.
The Backlash Is Predictable
I know talented developers who are refusing to engage with this. Smart people. Experienced people. People I’ve worked with for years. They look at “vibe coding” and dismiss it as a toy. They see AI-generated code and point out every flaw like that settles the argument. They treat the current limitations as permanent instead of temporary.
I get it. If you’ve spent 15 years mastering a craft, watching someone with no experience produce something in an afternoon that sort of looks like what you do…that’s threatening. The instinct is to discredit it. “That code is garbage.” “It won’t scale.” “It doesn’t handle edge cases.” And right now, some of those criticisms are fair.
But the criticisms are about where the tools are today, not where they’re going. And the trajectory is not subtle.
The developers who are leaning in right now are taking their years of experience…their understanding of architecture, their instinct for what will break, their ability to evaluate whether something is actually good…and applying all of that to a tool that lets them move 10x faster. They’re not replacing their skills. They’re amplifying them. A senior developer who knows how to use these tools is more dangerous than they’ve ever been.
The developers who are crossing their arms and waiting for it to blow over are the ones who’ll be wondering what happened in three years.
This Isn’t Just About Developers
I’m using the developer example because it’s the loudest backlash right now, but this applies to everyone. Every skill you have is about to become more powerful if you let it.
Marketers who understand their audience can use AI to produce more content, test more variations, and move faster than a team of five could last year. Designers who understand composition and brand can use AI to iterate at a pace that wasn’t possible before. Writers who understand narrative structure can use AI to research, outline, and draft while they focus on the parts that actually require a human brain…voice, judgment, taste.
The people who are going to struggle are the ones who define themselves by the mechanics of their work instead of the thinking behind it. If your value is “I can write a for-loop” then yes, you should be worried. If your value is “I know how to architect a system that handles 10,000 concurrent users and doesn’t fall over at 3am”…you just got a tool that lets you build that system in a fraction of the time.
The skill isn’t the software. The skill is the judgment. The tools change. The judgment doesn’t.
The Drafting Table Is Right There
I think about those Art Directors all the time. Not because they were bad at their jobs. They were great at their jobs. Their hand-drawn layouts were beautiful. Their craftsmanship was real. But they defined themselves by the physical act of drawing on paper instead of by the creative thinking that made their work good.
The creative thinking was the valuable part. The drafting table was just a tool. When a better tool came along, the ones who picked it up got more powerful. The ones who didn’t got left behind. Not because the new tool was perfect…early Illustrator was clunky as hell…but because the direction was obvious to anyone willing to look.
Computers didn’t take their jobs. They just refused to pick up the new tools.
That’s the choice in front of everyone right now. The tools are sitting right there on the desk. They’re not perfect. They’re getting better every week. And the people who pick them up first are going to have a head start that compounds over time.
Sure, the drafting table is comfortable. I understand that. But it’s time to let it go.