Continuing off of the last discussion around ‘The Death of Mid’…
There’s another split forming, and it has less to do with the divide in quality of work and more to do with a division in how people think. It’s a random musing of thoughts, but bear with me.
AI works best when problems are decomposed, steps are explicit, sequences are clear, and constraints are articulated. This kind of thinking—process thinking, decomposition, sequential reasoning—has traditionally been strongest in engineering, architecture, and systems design.
What we started to see in mid 2025 with Claude Code agents / skills / subagents and will see much more in 2026 are people who already think this way translating ideas into structured steps, feeding them into AI, and dramatically accelerating their output. Case in point: Cursed – a Gen Z programming language from the mind of Geoffrey Huntley.
So What’s Your Point?
Let’s take the opposite end of the spectrum:
AI struggles with ambiguity, emotional nuance, and situation-specific judgment. You can’t write a universal, step-by-step playbook for great sales without drowning it in caveats.
However—if someone can decompose their own expertise—how they build trust, how they read a room, how they sequence conversations, how they adjust based on signals—then AI can amplify that.
The Pattern Beneath Everything
This all points to a deeper truth about expertise. Mastery isn’t magic.
It’s the ability to do something badly, then do it acceptably, then do it well, then understand why it works, and finally know when to break it and create something new. In martial arts, it’s known as Shu-Ha-Ri (roughly translated to “obey”, “digress”, “separate”)
AI is phenomenal at the Shu. But humans still dominate Ha and Ri: understanding why something works and knowing when to break the rules to create something innovative and original.
The future of work won’t belong to people who fight AI—or people who blindly rely on it. It will belong to those who understand their craft deeply enough to translate it, decompose it, and extend it.
It’s the end of the middle, the death of Mid, and the beginning of something sharper.
Note of full disclosure: I wrote most of this using Wispr and Notion’s internal writing AI refinement tools. The words are my own, proofread and edited thoughts from a human (me), by a human (also me), with an AI meddling in the middle (supervised and berated, by me).