The New Luddites: GenAI Will End Value Maintenance—Now It's a Relentless Race for Value Creation
The rise of Generative AI isn't just another technological revolution—it's a fundamental recalibration of human value that will force us to confront uncomfortable truths about how we work, value creation, and our identity. While headlines fixate on job displacement and doomsday scenarios (Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter), the real transformation, like with the original Luddites, is far more profound and disruptive.
As Chip Huyen, author of the book "AI Engineering," brilliantly observed, "I don't think AI introduces a new kind of thinking. It reveals what actually requires thinking." It reveals what truly requires thinking, what actions generate real value versus mere theater, and forces us to confront the world's complexity. It unleashes a new economy, a new world.
Imagine your career as a competitive sport. Today, most of us play in the equivalent of recreational leagues—we show up, participate respectably, and enjoy the game. While we once dreamed of a big NBA career, we have settled into the recreational leagues. We know Bob is horrible at shooting but he is a good guy and always brings beers. GenAI is about to promote everyone to the NBA overnight—where maintaining your roster spot requires relentless excellence, continuous evolution, and no off-days. Soon, many of us will yearn nostalgically for those lower-stakes competitions, but the low-stakes are getting eaten up by GenAI.
Software Development: From Coding to Value Creation
We're already witnessing how software development—once the epitome of knowledge work—is dramatically transforming. As Mike Loukides notes in "The End of Programming as We Know It," the traditional paradigm of developers writing explicit code is giving way to AI-driven development.
"Vibe coding" is emerging as developers describe what they want in broad strokes, and AI coding assistants generate the implementation. It is spurring many to explore what it means - Andrew Chen penning, "Vibe coding, some thoughts and predictions".
As AI automates the grunt work the days of developers hiding in maintenance tasks are coming to a quick end. AI will eat all maintenance tasks, leaving only the most strategic, high-impact work in human hands. The value isn't in writing the code anymore—it's in knowing what code should be written and why.
But what if I'm a 10x coder who did the impossible on the last project for my company? If that same project flopped or failed to make a dent in the market - all that 10x code you delivered was maintenance. Maintenance for the company to continue to take shots on goal knowing most will fail, and hopefully they can learn from them. Developers, even 10x Developers won't be able to hide in siloed linear thinking, they must apply systems thinking and see how they contribute to creating value. The real challenge isn't just writing better code; it's ensuring that what gets built truly matters. Which leads to…
From Code to Bets: The Rise of Software Teams as Betting Syndicates
The workplace of the future isn't just a backlog of tasks to clear. Those become trivial, automated, handled before they even make it to a meeting. Instead, software organizations will resemble a high-stakes betting syndicate—where the real focus is on experiments, product discovery, and bold wagers on what comes next. Execution becomes a given; innovation and adaptation become the only differentiators. Actually only "successful" innovation and adaptation matter. If this becomes the standard, imagine what could happen if everyone, in every company, was focused solely on this level of value creation.
The Value Creation Army Is Assembling—Brace for an Explosion in Value Creation
Imagine you and everyone at your company focused solely on value creation - an army of value creation. New features will show up in days. All our present desires could be met. How would that economy look? But what about the pressure to constantly perform? What about the fear of falling behind in this relentless race?
Will We Be the Next Generation of Luddites?
On the flip side, I can see the NBA star who is entering the later years of his career. Exhausted by the daily grind, their body not holding up as well as it use to, the new star who joined the team bringing down your point contribution.
Most likely we as the new Luddites will not smash looms like the Luddites, but contribute to a reinforcing of the theater of work. We will come up with and support ever more elaborate theater. We'll tell ourselves that only the human condition can actually deliver here.
But such efforts will be as productive as the original Luddites smashing looms. Eventually GenAI will expose the theater for what it is.
What Happens When We Run Out of Value?
When the new Luddites eventually concede and the value creation army churns through our existing desires, what will the economy resemble? Like the bewildered sentiment from that GEICO commercial (ECON 101 | Progressive Insurance Commercial): "What's the economy?"—we may need to fundamentally rethink our economic frameworks.
We humans have consistently demonstrated an extraordinary ability to create new desires once basic needs are met. The 16th-century farmer couldn't conceive of a world where people spend thousands on luxury timepieces that do little more than what a $10 watch accomplishes. Similarly, the workers of the Industrial Revolution couldn't imagine digital creators making millions from virtual content.
This pattern suggests not a scarcity of value, but an evolution of it. As GenAI automates the satisfaction of today's desires, we won't "run out" of value—we'll redefine it, discovering entirely new dimensions of human want and need that we cannot yet envision.
Brace for the Shift—And Don't Fall Into the Luddite Trap
While a future world of running out of value is great to contemplate, the transition will be rough. As my friend bluntly puts it, "really rough." But resisting change—taking the Luddite route—is a losing battle.
To navigate this transition, focus on the existing gaps between AI and human intelligence—gaps that may never fully close. While AI excels at pattern recognition through statistical analysis of large datasets and reward functions, it currently struggles with making intuitive leaps or educated guesses when information is limited. Humans naturally look beyond statistical correlations to find meaningful signals in noisy or incomplete data, drawing on contextual understanding to make reasonable inferences. This capacity for intuitive reasoning under uncertainty remains a gap between us and AI.
Given that, steps you can take to better manage the transition.
- Embrace complexity and uncertainty
- Adopt systems thinking over linear approaches
- Think in bets rather than seeking certainty
- Look for the signal in the noise
- Learn to understand
As Richard Feynman said, "I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way–by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!"