The Shiny Object Trap
When you can do anything, what you don't do is the skill
AI has eaten my day job from three years ago.
Imagine you’re an ML engineer at a tech company. You’ve been tasked with a greenfield ML project. You are practical and want to get a simple 80/20 solution going to get signal sooner than later.
2020: You are pragmatic and will not fall prey to overly complex implementations. XGBoost, tabular data, and a few weeks to implement. Getting results in weeks instead of months is the play.
2026: You spin up a team of AI agents. One to build out your complex neural net, one to run an autoresearch loop implementing recent research papers, one to build out a robust evaluation suite to avoid hallucinated garbage results. To be conservative, initial implementation should be done by tomorrow.
Simple has changed. What took weeks now takes a day. And as a result, the option space for what to work on has exploded.
A paradox: we have more capability in everything. But sometimes that leads to less overall velocity on change that matters.
This is the Shiny Object Trap. Suddenly side quests are free. Writing doc proposals is free. The cost to go from thought to implementation has dropped to near zero. And that often leads to a proliferation of AI slop. Many more ideas, proposals, and code implementations than will ever see the light of day.
So it raises the question: what skills still matter when you can do anything?
The first question that should filter any idea is: will this land in my specific world?
Context is scarce. AI is getting better and better at the context of code and writing. But it certainly lacks the messy context of working with humans in a team, in an organization, pushing towards common goals. AI has no sense of that.
Two skills still matter.
1) Focus
Having the discipline to say no to every shiny object that pops into your head. To not spread yourself so thin that you can’t push in one direction on bets you’re confident will matter.
2) Prediction
Before you start building, before you even scope: will this land, and will it matter? Implementation is the easy part now. The hard part is knowing whether to start.
It’s still a human skill, at a higher level of thinking, to see beyond the context window to what actually matters in your world.
When you can do anything, what you actually focus on is the skill. We can all build now. We can all write docs now. We can all AI slop cannon our way to the Shiny Object Trap.
It’s what you double down and choose to build, and just as much what you choose to skip.