AI won't take your job. Someone who uses it better will.

TL;DR

• Excel has been around for 40 years and hardly anyone masters it
• AI will be the same: many users, few experts
• Jobs don’t disappear, they evolve
• Your edge isn’t the tool—it’s how long you’ve been using it

---

I’ve been using paid AI tools daily for two years. Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022.

And I’ve been hearing the same thing for two years: “AI is going to take our jobs.”

No.

AI won’t take your job. Someone who uses it better than you will.

The Excel lesson

Excel came out in 1985. That’s 40 years.

How many people actually master it?

• 80% can do a SUM
• 15% use pivot tables
• 4% know VLOOKUP
• 1% write macros

40 years. And most people never get past SUM().

AI will be exactly the same.

The pyramid today

Here’s what I see in 2025:

• General public → Uses ChatGPT. Badly. Asks “summarize this” and accepts whatever comes out.
• Technical folks → Know Claude exists. Understand there are differences between models.
• Developers → Use Claude Code. Think it’s “for programming.”
• Very few → Know what MCP is. See it as mystical language.
• The 1% → Understand that AI predicts tokens. Know how and why it works.

Where are you on that pyramid?

Where are your competitors?

The proxy doesn’t disappear

An SEO specialist is a proxy between what Google wants and what the business needs. Google changes the algorithm every week. The SEO adapts and keeps translating. Been that way for 20 years.

A sysadmin is a proxy between infrastructure and the business. Used to configure servers by hand. Now writes YAML for Kubernetes. Tools change. The role remains.

A data engineer is a proxy between business questions and data. Used to write SQL by hand. Now tells Claude what’s needed and Claude writes the SQL.

But someone still has to:

• Know what question to ask
• Know if the answer makes sense
• Know how to explain it to the business

AI doesn’t do that. You do.

The proxy doesn’t disappear. The proxy is the job.

The wrong fear

The freelancer afraid of AI is looking in the wrong direction.

AI won’t take your job.

Another freelancer will—one who:

• Has been using AI for 2 years while you hesitated
• Delivers in 2 hours what takes you 2 days
• Charges the same but produces 5x more

That freelancer isn’t on Reddit celebrating a website running on localhost:3000.

That freelancer is quiet, billing clients, accumulating advantage.

The real edge

The edge isn’t “knowing how to use ChatGPT.” Everyone knows that (poorly).

The edge is:

• Accumulated time using advanced tools
• Knowing when AI is wrong (and it’s wrong a lot)
• Knowing which tool to use for each problem
• Understanding why it works, not just that it works

If you start today, you’re late. But you arrive.

If you don’t start, in 2 years you’ll be like the localhost:3000 guy: thinking you know, not knowing that you don’t.

What to do now

1. Stop being afraid. AI is a tool. Like Excel. Like Google. Like email.

2. Start using it for real. Not to “try it out”—to work. Every day.

3. Level up. ChatGPT is fine to start. But there’s more. Claude, Claude Code, MCP, agents…

4. Understand what’s underneath. You don’t need to know how to train models. But you should understand what tokens are, how context works, why it sometimes hallucinates.

5. Accumulate advantage. Every day you use AI in your work is a day your competitors aren’t.

AI won’t take your job.

Someone who uses it better than you will.

Don’t let someone else be that person. Be that person yourself.