To grow as fast as your scaling company, you must proactively hand off your responsibilities ("Legos") to others. This fights the natural tendency to be territorial and creates space for you to tackle new, bigger challenges.
The original "Legos" advice involved completely handing off a task and its mental burden. When you give a task to AI, you are merely delegating. You cannot get rid of the oversight, accountability, and the "mental tax" of ensuring the final output is correct.
Unlike delegating to humans in a growing company, certain tasks should not be outsourced to AI. Work that requires deep judgment, establishes trust, or where you can't define "good" (like corporate strategy) must be retained by humans to avoid low-quality outcomes.
Many professionals, especially engineers, feel a sense of grief as AI automates the hands-on, flow-state-inducing work they loved ("rowing"). The new job of "steering" AI agents feels isolating and disconnected, replacing human collaboration with robot management.
Combat the fear of AI-driven job loss by adopting the mindset of journalist Manoush Somorodi. Instead of asking "Will my job disappear?", ask "What if my job always exists, but reinvents itself constantly?" This encourages proactive learning and shaping the future of your profession.
People often blindly trust AI output, leading to a flood of low-quality work ("AI slop"). To combat this, treat AI not as a genius, but as a lazy intern. This mindset forces you to provide context, coach it, iterate on its work, and take full accountability for the final product.
Delegating work to AI requires the same skills as managing a junior human employee: providing context, reviewing work, and giving feedback. This means every IC using AI is now functionally a manager, a role many have actively avoided and may find draining.
The prevailing story about AI is that you must pour all your knowledge into a super-intelligent tool that will then take your job. This creates fear and resistance, preventing the curious adoption needed to unlock AI's potential.
People are feeling a mix of grief, fear, and burnout from rapid, AI-driven change. Leaders must create space to talk about these emotions openly. Simply acknowledging that the change is hard and scary validates people's experience, making them feel less alone and more sane.
Originally for employees at hyper-growth companies, the advice was surprisingly adopted by people in all environments. This revealed the core challenge isn't just corporate scaling, but the universal human difficulty of navigating any significant personal or professional change.
AI dramatically lowers the barrier to creating products, which will likely result in a wave of short-lived "slop startups" that prioritize speed over quality. The real opportunity is to build something enduring and phenomenal, using human taste and judgment as a differentiator.
In times of rapid change, expertise has a short shelf life. Your ability to learn and adapt is more critical than your current knowledge. Standing still and clinging to what you know is the riskiest career move, as you're guaranteed to fall behind.