Are you ready for the AI world?

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Four years ago I wrote Sharpen the saw. Same message still holds, but the saw changed. If you are still sharpening only what you know, you are sharpening the wrong thing.

So let's do the uncomfortable check again.

• When did you last build something with AI (and I am not talking about few ChatGPT prompts)?
• When did you last try a new model, a new tool, or a new workflow?
• How much time did you spend last week consuming AI content vs. actually using AI to change something?

Snowball with AI, or get buried by it

Your knowledge is the small snowball. AI is the snow around. Used right, you compound years of experience into weeks of output. Used wrong, you generate plausible looking nonsense and call it a day.

The point is not to let AI do your job. The point is to let AI do the boring 80% so you can go deeper on the part that actually needs you. Talking to users. Delivering value.

If you are a senior and you still hand-write boilerplate code in 2026, you are burning daylight.

Build a daily system, remove the noise

You can't snowball anything if you are drowning in tabs, half-written notes, multiple inboxes and constant interruptions from social networks. Pick a system. Any system. Then actually use it.

• A checklist for each day, to help you focus on important things. Stop checking other sources of work, consolidate here the work for whole day before you start.
• A calendar block for deep work. Another for learning and experimenting. That is crutial.
• One place for notes, ideas and tasks. And that place is called Obsidian, at least for me.

Clean your notes. Clean your files. Clean your head. You are not going to outthink a cluttered desk.

I built my own brain as a git-versioned Obsidian vault with Claude as the librarian. You don't need to copy that, but you do need something. I might write about this later.

Capture ideas, but turn them into actions

Every developer I know has a graveyard of great ideas that never got out of their head. Ideas that stay in your head don't count. Ideas in a note that you never open don't count either.

Capture fast, process weekly, ship something monthly. Build your digital twin, yes, but feed it actions, not only thoughts. If a note has been sitting untouched for six months, either do it, schedule it, or delete it. I have this in progress, but I am building skills daily to automate things, which seems impossible to automate just few months back.

Learning time is not optional anymore

Models and the tools around them are evolving every month. New release, new feature, new way of working. If you are not experimenting at least weekly, you are already behind by a version or two.

One hour a day. Half a day a week. One weekend a month. Pick your cadence, same as in Sharpen the saw, just pointed at AI now. Rebuild something you already built, with a new tool. Don't just consume the content, but actually build something!

Using AI is a skill itself

Running prompts blindly is not "using AI". It is gambling with extra steps.

You have to know the tools, know their limits, know when to switch models, know when the output is confidently wrong. You have to build context for the model the same way you would brief a junior developer – explain the system, the intent, the constraints, then let them act. AI isn't the breakthrough. Context is.

Your next job interview

Your next interview will have one question that matters:
What can you do that AI can't?

If you can't answer that with specifics, you can't justify your price. "I know PL/SQL" is not enough anymore. "I can design a data model that won't collapse under real traffic and I use AI to move ten times faster on the tedious parts" is a different answer entirely. But what companies want to hear is that you can now deliver much more and much better for the same money.

Same for freelancers/consultants. The market will separate the people who used AI to compound their skills from the people who don't.

Actions

Here is a concrete self-check: Where do you land on the Zapier AI Fluency Matrix? Be honest about where you are, not where you'd like to be.

Short and painful, no excuses:

• Stop just consuming AI content. Start experimenting.
• Stop hesitating. Start moving.
• Stop waiting for your employer to train you. Start training yourself.
• Stop collecting tools or ideas. Start shipping.

Pick one thing from that list, do it this week. Go build something!

And if this article made you think about a colleague who badly needs to read it, send it their way.