Depth is Rented Now

jack of all trades, master of none

for most of my life that was an insult i pointed at myself.

i was always the guy who picked up a lot of things and finished almost none of them. i could get conversant in something fast, fast enough to be dangerous, never far enough to be the guy. and the people around me went deep. one language, one instrument, one craft, ten thousand hours, all of it. they had something i didn't. a clean answer to "what are you." i envied that way more than i ever admitted to anyone.

then i found out everybody stops reading the proverb too early.

the full line, or at least the version that's been floating around forever (nobody can actually pin down who said it first, so don't quote me as gospel), goes like this:

jack of all trades, master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.

the half we all memorized was the insult. the half nobody quotes was the entire point. and llms just made that forgotten half true in a way it never really was before.

think about it. for the whole history of work, depth was expensive. you paid for it in years. if you wanted what a specialist could do you either became one or you hired one, and that was the only menu. that scarcity is what made mastery feel like identity. you bled for the depth so the depth was you.

depth is rented now. it's on tap. i can pull a competent-enough version of almost any specialist skill in the time it takes to write a decent prompt. the moat that took somebody ten years to dig, i can wade across in a session.

i want to be careful with this part because it's where people actually get hurt.

i know three people further along than me, all genuinely excellent, the cum laude ivy league mastered-their-craft kind of excellent, who are quietly falling apart over this. not because they got worse. because the job changed under them while they were standing on it. the work that used to be doing the thing they loved turned into asking a model to do the thing they loved and then cleaning up after it. and when the thing you built your whole identity around becomes a thing you babysit instead of perform, that's not a productivity update, that's a death in the family. they're taking career breaks to figure out who they even are now. i don't think they're being dramatic. i think they're being honest.

so no, i'm not here to dunk on specialists. they're mourning something real, and honestly a lot of the generalist smugness about ai is just cope from people who never had anything deep enough to lose.

but here's what actually happened to me, and it caught me off guard.

i never went deep enough to fall in love with one tool. that always felt like the flaw, the thing i was supposed to fix. turns out it meant i never built my identity out of something a model could swallow whole. the thing i did accidentally spend my whole life practicing, pointing at a messy problem and figuring out what to ask and duct-taping five things i half understand into something that works, is the one skill that didn't get rented out from under me. taste. knowing which question is the right question. there's no xerox machine for that yet.

embracing this stuff didn't feel like getting ahead. it felt like coming home. like the thing that made me feel behind my whole life was secretly the prep work the entire time.

i don't want to oversell it though. knowing what to ask is its own real skill and plenty of generalists are bad at it. breadth with no judgment is just being shallow in more places, and the model will not save you from that. and the specialists who adapt, the ones who learn to aim their depth instead of just performing it, are going to be scarier than any of us. this isn't a coronation. it's just a weird little window where the math flipped in a direction it never had before.

but for the first time in my life i'm not trying to fix being a master of none.

i'm just trying to get really good at being better than a master of one.