The Intersection of One

I finished my final year of school with one specific question in mind. I wanted to know why I should spend four years studying a subject that I could learn in a week and start using by the second week. Tools available today make this possible. Everyone I talked to had the same advice. They told me to get the degree so I could get a placement and a job. But nobody actually answered my question about the time and the utility of the learning itself.

I think we are seeing a shift in how work happens. Companies are moving faster than they ever have before. AI is making the actual work of building things much cheaper and faster. Tasks that used to require a team of five people can now be done by one person with the right tools in a single weekend. In this environment, the traditional filter of a college degree makes less sense. Over half of employers have already stopped requiring degrees. This system is not going to disappear tomorrow, but it is changing very quickly.

People often argue that college is about building judgment rather than just gaining knowledge. I used to think that might be true. However, judgment comes from feedback. You build something, it fails, you learn why it failed, and you try again. College used to be one of the few places where you could find that kind of environment. That is no longer the case. You can build a real product and put it in front of users to get real feedback today. You can do this before you ever attend a single lecture.

AI has accelerated this change. Current models can review your code or your writing. They can find the exact spot where your logic failed and explain why. In the past, you needed a senior engineer or a professor for that kind of specific critique. Now, you just need to start a conversation with a model. Research shows that students using this kind of immediate feedback improve their ability to correct their own mistakes by 41%. The exclusive hold that universities had on quality feedback is gone.

This leaves us with the question of what value remains. I believe the answer is taste. When the work of execution is handled by AI, the difference between one person and another is what they choose to build. It comes down to why they are building it and how it should feel to the user. This is not a skill you can pick up in a short course. It is a point of view that you develop over years. It comes from being curious, having opinions, and caring deeply about the quality of your work.

We are moving toward a future driven by personal interest. When it becomes easy to learn any skill, the only thing that stands out is genuine obsession. If someone is fascinated by urban planning and also understands graphic design, they will create something unique. A specialist in only one of those fields would not think of the same solution. The most interesting work happens where different interests meet. This comes from following your own curiosity rather than following a fixed syllabus.

The old way of working told us to pick one lane. You were supposed to be a software engineer or a finance analyst. That made sense when execution was difficult and you had to specialize to be useful. But if AI handles the execution, the person who can see the whole problem becomes more valuable. Being able to understand design, logic, and communication all at once is a major advantage. A person who can connect these dots is more effective than three specialists who only understand their own narrow areas.

I think we are all becoming architects. I do not mean that in the sense of building houses. I mean that our job is to decide what gets built and why it matters. The actual execution—like writing code or drafting documents—will be handled by models. We do not know exactly what form future AI will take, but it might not even look like a tool we use. The people who succeed will be those with a clear internal compass who can direct these systems toward a meaningful goal.

There is a risk in this approach, which is having a shallow understanding of too many things. Learning a little bit of everything is only useful if you can actually produce a finished product. I use a simple test to see if my knowledge is deep enough. I ask myself if I can produce work in this area that someone would actually use or pay for. If the answer is yes, then the knowledge is real. If I only have a surface-level familiarity, it does not count for much.

When I look at my options after finishing school, I am not looking for the skill that will get me a job in five years. I am looking at what kind of person I want to be. I am focusing on what I am curious about and what kind of taste I am developing. In a world where doing the work is cheap, your taste is your career. The people with the biggest advantage are those who follow their curiosity, build things with real stakes, and learn what good work looks like. That is a practice, not a degree.