Patrick
Branigan

I went to see my grandfather recently. He’s definitely in the final phase of the final portion of his time here on Earth. It was quite the experience – very emotional as you might imagine. I hadn’t seen him in about a year, which has been the regular cadence for the last few years.

I have a large family between my mother’s and father’s sides. I’ve seen family nearing the end before, especially more recently. But I’m not sure I’d ever seen a person reduced all the way down. I mean nearly ALL. THE. WAY. DOWN. To the degree I’m surprised they’re living. We spend our lives padded in a bubble of forethought, worry, and the constant seeking of satisfaction — by what we can do, what we make, what we produce, etc. None of that is left for my grandfather. He can very barely move. He can speak maybe a mumble. We’re not even sure he can see at this point. Bedridden, needing full attention. The floor of a human being. The bare minimum.

My mom did warn me that ‘grandpa isn’t what you remember.’ I assured her I expected to be confronted with a shell of the person I have seared in my memory. But when I did finally see him, it shook me more than I expected. I’m good at hiding emotions (for better or worse). And I was mentally prepared. So I was “fine” in comparison to others. But, yeah…damn. It was something to see and experience. Partly because I never see humans in this state. And partly because of what was still there.

Three things, as far as I could tell, were still fully his. He was breathing. His heart was still beating on its own. And — the one I keep coming back to — every so often, he could still make sense of nonsense. Take fragments that don’t connect and reach for the thread between them, to our surprise. He knew it was his birthday, even just for a few seconds, because he could see a balloon with candles on it attached to his bed and motioned to blow air at them. His eyes would briefly widen when he surely recognized me by voice, before slipping into his next hallucination. He still mouthed ice cream, even if just one scoop, even if just momentarily (and that’s literally all he can “eat”). Reduced this far, he was still running. He was still very clearly a human.

I spend my days next to machines that are beginning to out-produce me by a mile. Sitting in the room with my grandfather, it occurred to me that the only things still flickering in him are the exact things none of these machines have (well, I suppose you could argue except for “hallucinations”). A model doesn’t breathe. Nothing inside it decides, on its own, to keep going. And for everything it can pattern-match, it can’t do the thing my grandfather still does without trying — make meaning where there plainly is none.

Right now we are in a time where we keep measuring ourselves against what AI can produce. My grandfather, even in the state he’s in, makes me believe that the parts of us worth anything are the parts that keep going when there’s nothing left to produce at all. A breath. A beating heart. A willingness, even if fleeting, when there’s nothing left.

Historically, the career ladder pointed in one direction: away from work and into hot, high tower seats. Proof is in witnessing friends and family sacrifice values for titles. Proof is in the engagement motivations on platforms like LinkedIn. You would do your thing well enough that you “earned” the right to stop doing it. Then, you’d manage the people who do it. Then, you’d manage the people who manage them. Sadly, the further you drifted from the actual work the larger the reward.

I admit it. I was following suit for some time myself. I designed, then had people design, then had people who tell people how and what to design. And I found it a pretty shitty experience. Not just because I was moving away from the work, but because I was moving away from the relationships built with other people through our shared work.

Now, it seems, people are beginning to invite this reversal – intentionally drifting back towards actually doing the work. We have AI to thank for this.

When output is cheap, coordination isn’t what’s scarce. It’s judgement, and the willingness to own what gets shipped. A manager three layers removed from the work can’t exercise. They can approve, they can deflect, they can reorganize, but all of these things are the easiest maths for AI to own, AND these managers can’t actually stand behind a decision they didn’t make, on work they didn’t touch, in a system they will eventually no longer understand.

The person who can is the one sitting in the terminal. They’re close enough to the work to know what’s true. They’re close enough to carry the consequence when it goes wrong. These are the positions that used to be at the bottom of the ladder, but now they’re becoming the top of the leverage that’s emerging.

I joined my current company (Workweek) as a Founding Designer, not to sit in a terminal and code, but to envision, map, concept, design and make tangible the journeys and systems that empower thought leaders to curate communities and distribute their voices. The most useful I’ve been in the last year has been sitting in the terminal – breaking shit, shipping things, eating consequences and learning from them. My decisions immediately have impact. My decisions immediately validate ideas. My decisions immediately inspire and motivate others.

And I’m not the only one. My CEO spent two sleepless weeks doing what one might consider 50% of my job. My job isn’t to interview, analyze and walk in the shoes of the power user. Instead I let the power user build the thing. My job is to now ensure it makes most sense. Ensure it abides by the bounds of fundamental principles of design. Ensure that thing builds trust, shows empathy, and empowers other users. Most excitingly, my job is also much more about injecting delight and magic.

I’m an IC. My CEO is an IC. Our head of engineering is an IC. Our sales are ICs.

Going IC isn’t a step down. When everyone can produce, the people who can produce and own what they produce and continuously enhance what they produce are the rare ones. That’s not a fall back. That’s a power move. And it’s never been more possible than right now.

There’s been a fuck ton of content written about how much and how fast code can be produced by AI. Lines per hour. PRs per day. Features per week. Hell, I was sitting in a pub just this month when I ran into the father of Jesse Pickard – founder and CEO of The Mind Company – and the first thing he mentions when learning about my line of work is “my son was telling me companies out where he is are laying people off if they haven’t spent enough tokens and output enough code.”

It’s absurd how much conversation lives on that side of the ledger.

There’s another side, and I haven’t heard a lick about it in comparison.

AI might generate the code. But AI doesn’t own the consequence of the code.

The model doesn’t get paged at 2AM, refund customers, or sit in a postmortem. It doesn’t look a team in the eye on a Monday. When something goes wrong (which it will, pretty often), the consequence lands on a human, whether it be a reviewer, maintainer, orchestrator, or whoever made the call to ship.

This asymmetry was easy to overlook when generated code was a novelty. But the more code gets produced, the more consequence accumulates somewhere – and that somewhere is likely to be a human.

This changes what’s important to measure when building something. It used to be (still is) enough to ask how much someone (or some model) could produce. The more intriguing question is going to become how much can someone take ownership for? How many decisions can they stand behind? How much of the consequence are they willing to carry? How heavy of a time are they willing to endure?

It’s been well over a month since I last opened Figma to actually create something. I’ve handled every single piece of work at hand with Claude Code. That’s not to say everything has worked out well. Sometimes the experience has been less efficient. Sometimes the process has been bloated. Sometimes the output has been dead wrong. But one thing is true: regardless, it’s made output faster. That’s what people and businesses want. They want everything, faster. It’s the output that everyone is fixated on. But the only real reason I’ve been faster is because I have an interest and a comfort with learning and executing inside a terminal.

Output is now easy. Input is where the world will focus next.

Roughly half a billion people per day intentionally interface with AI tools. 5%-10% of those people are on the supply side (building, deploying or directly supporting AI products). There’s an immense amount of adoption and scale still to be done. However, as we’ve seen with the tumultuous history of VR for example, adoption is directly correlated with customer convenience and confidence (in the product and in the price).

The customer needs to be confident they can do (whatever it is they want to do) and comfortable doing (whatever it is they’re doing). I’m not so certain we’ve cracked this yet. AI products and services seem to be falling into two camps: pushed down your throat through your existing products and services without your permission via quiet integration, or soft and hard gated behind sign ups, paywalls, and other data collection layers up front.

The former makes customers uncomfortable. The latter makes customers lack confidence.

The next swell of AI innovation might just be how we interface with our AI, or rather how our AI begins more naturally interfacing with us. It will become less about what can AI do for me, and more about how comfortable and confident does AI make me feel in whatever I’m doing.