What to deliver and what to keep in the age of AI
Last Friday I was talking with one of my guidees about what to deliver and what not to deliver as part of our work, now that so much knowledge can be turned into a skill or part of a prompt.
For years, unwritten knowledge was your best protection. What you knew but couldn't easily document was what made you hard to replace.
With AI it's the exact opposite. For it to work well, you have to make explicit what was previously intuitive. You have to write down how you think, what you prioritize, how you structure problems. This has made people with solid work methodologies automatically much more productive.
Because you're able to articulate your work methodology, you can make AI replicate it. This carries a risk: what's explicit is transferable.
If you work for clients and deliver those configurations, you didn't just deliver the project. You delivered your way of working, your methodology, and your judgment accumulated over years of practice.
The line is clearer than it seems
What goes into the project configuration:
- Stack conventions
- Domain rules
- Business-specific context
Everything that exists because it's that project. That belongs to the client and should stay with them.
What stays with you:
- What questions you ask before starting
- How you evaluate whether the result is good
- How you detect when AI is wrong
- How you orchestrate multiple tools to work together
- How you extract knowledge to build automations
- How much you research and stay up to date
- What patterns you identify in new tools to integrate them into your workflows
The first list describes the project. The second list describes you.
A client can keep the first one. The second is built over years of practice and it belongs to you — don't give it away.
Company-level collective knowledge
There's another category: collective knowledge at the company level.
At company level, there are configurations, internal tools and methodologies that multiply the effectiveness of the entire team. Those belong to the company and benefit everyone who works there.
The key is knowing how to distinguish what's personal, what's collective knowledge at your company level that you can share with your colleagues for everyone's benefit, and what's project-specific knowledge that can be delivered to your client.