I Told My Team AI Will Change Their Job
Zack AllenOctober 19, 20261:59
A real 1-on-1 with someone on my team about how AI will change their job: learn the process first, then automate it, so you know how to fix it when it breaks.
In a recent 1-on-1, the conversation turned to AI and what it means for the work my team does every day.
Here's what I told them: AI isn't going to take your job, but it is going to change it. More and more, your job becomes monitoring the systems and making sure nothing goes wrong, instead of doing every step by hand. And when something does go wrong, you have to know how to put it right.
Learn the process before you automate it
I've preached this since the beginning. I want my team to understand the fundamentals first, so the software becomes an accelerator and not a crutch.
AI is no different. A lot of people go AI-first. I'd rather someone on my team understands the process behind a task before we start automating it. Otherwise, when the automation goes sideways, nobody knows what happened or how to recover.
The person I was talking to put it well: you can't automate something if you don't know how the whole thing works. You have to tell the AI what to do, and sometimes it gives you a bad suggestion. If you know the process, you can say, "No, that doesn't make sense. Do this instead."
Three years later
They pointed out that three years ago they were doing very different work. Now they're building web apps and handling deployments.
That's how it should be. We should always adapt to what the work requires right now, not keep doing the same thing forever because that's how we've always done it. The goal is to find the most efficient way to do the work with the tools available today.
Room for bigger problems
Automation isn't about doing less. It makes room to solve bigger problems. You can't work on those when you're stuck typing inventory into a spreadsheet.
All three of us on the team have moved past that stage. Our time can go to harder, more valuable problems, and the people who learned the process by hand are the ones best placed to run the systems that replace it.
Transcript
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AI's not going to take your job, but it's going to change your job, and it's going to mean that you're just kind of monitoring the systems and like making sure that nothing goes wrong rather than having to do the work yourself. And like when it does go wrong, you have to know how to fix it.
Yeah, and like at this point, too, like you've done it enough to be ready for something else. So like
Exactly, which is why I always like you know, I've preached this since the beginning. It's like I want you to understand the fundamental first so that you can use the software as a accelerator. And then the same thing here, a lot of people will go AI first. But like I want you to understand the process behind it before we start automating it cuz then you don't know what happens when it goes wrong.
Yeah, and you can't really automate it if you don't really know how the whole thing works.
Yeah, exactly.
Cuz you have to tell it and sometimes it gives you like shitty suggestions of how to do it. Like
100% and you're like, "No, that does not make any sense."
No, do this instead. Yeah, that's why it's fun cuz you give it instructions and it follows you and um and yeah, and I enjoy it a lot. So thank you, Doc.
Yes.
I mean, look at me, 3 years later doing like web apps, deployments.
And like that's how it should be though. Like we should always be adapting to what currently is required, not just like trying to do the same thing forever cuz that's what we have done. We need to figure out what the most efficient way to do the things are based on the current tools available to us.
Now we've got AI, basically we've got the world.
Exactly.
No, sky's the limit with AI. That's why um we got to automate everything. Um um
And it makes room for us to figure out more stuff. So solve more problems. You can't solve the bigger problems when you're worried about putting
Yeah.
Inventory into a spreadsheet.
I mean, at this point, I think all of all three of us have passed that.
Exactly.
Like time-wise, could use it for other stuff, definitely.
Exactly.
