There’s an old story about a knight who wears his armor across a river. The armor that won every battle on land drowns him in deep water.
I think about that story a lot when I hear people say they can’t use AI tools.
The complaint is usually about the tools. The tools are bad, the tools are unreliable, the tools don’t understand the nuance of the work.
Those things are sometimes true. But underneath the complaint, almost always, is something else: the tools that worked before are part of who we became. Letting them go feels like letting go of yourself.
It is, a little. That’s the hard part.
The hardest part of any leap forward isn’t learning the new thing. It’s putting down the version of you that the old thing built. The expert. The fast typist. The person who knew the keyboard shortcut by muscle memory. The role you played on the team because of a skill nobody else had.
You can keep the armor on and stay on the bank, or you can take it off and cross. The river doesn’t care. Take it off. Cross.