Carlos E. Perez

Introducing "A Pattern Language for Agentic AI Skill Design."

@Dan_Jeffries1 The civilization problem we have today is "artificial scarcity".

@IntuitMachine Good. We need more of this optimistic thinking. Doomsayers are legion right now. So I appreciate any thinking in this area. More importantly I think its right and it detonates the doomer argument elegantly.

AI Jobs of the Future 1/Everyone's talking about jobs AI will destroy. Almost nobody is talking about the jobs AI is creating. Not hypothetically. Right now. A whole new layer of the economy is forming and most people can't see it yet. Here are 8 jobs that didn't exist before AI — and the kind of person who thrives in each. 🧵 2/The fundamental error of the AI doomers isn't just the lump of labor fallacy. It's deeper. They assume a finite problem space. But technology doesn't reduce the amount of work. It moves the work UP THE STACK. And the new work is always more complex, more varied, and more interesting. 3/The hammer didn't eliminate work. It gave us houses instead of mud huts. And houses created: plumbing, wiring, insulation, roofing, drainage, fire codes. Each of those problems became a job. Plumber. Electrician. Roofer. Building inspector. None existed when we lived in mud huts. 4/AI solved "how do we automate cognitive labor?" And in doing so it created an entirely new problem space: — Harness engineering — Agent governance — Experiential reconnection — Capability development — Cognitive repricing — Shadow AI management — Regulatory navigation — Outcome pricing Each one is becoming an industry. 5/JOB 1: The Harness Engineer AI doesn't just work out of the box. 86-89% of enterprise AI pilots fail before reaching production. The harness engineer builds the infrastructure between AI capability and real-world execution. Context construction. Output verification. State management. Orchestration. 6/The personality: a systems thinker who is also a compulsive tinkerer. When a system fails, they don't retry — they read the logs. They find satisfaction in the gap between "works in demo" and "works in production." High tolerance for ambiguity. Low tolerance for hand-waving. They take apart the clock to understand why it loses two minutes a day. 7/JOB 2: The AI Governance Architect Only 23% of enterprises can fully inventory what their AI agents are doing. That's terrifying. This person builds audit trails for non-human entities. Identity management for AI agents. Compliance mapping across fragmented regulations. They're the building inspector of the AI era. 8/The personality: institutional patience combined with genuine institutional skepticism. They're former security people, former auditors, or former regulators who got frustrated that their profession was mostly theater. They don't compare policy docs to policy docs. They compare what agents actually DO to what governance CLAIMS. 9/JOB 3: The Experiential Reconnection Consultant The deepest, least commoditizable role in the entire AI economy. AI adds abstraction layers between action and consequence. More dashboards. More hops. Until no one in the organization actually experiences its purpose anymore. All metrics green. Organization dying. 10/The personality: someone who walks into a room and feels something is wrong before anyone speaks. They sense a metric is being gamed before they see the data. The test: when they deliver a diagnostic, the client doesn't say "huh, interesting" — someone goes quiet because they named something the client felt but couldn't articulate. 11/This person is usually not young. They've spent years developing what can only be called quality-sensing — feeling whether a structure is alive or dead. They combine the social perception of a great therapist with the structural thinking of a systems engineer. You cannot automate this. You cannot shortcut it. 12/JOB 4: The AI Capability Developer AI power users produce 10-50x output. Ordinary users type single prompts and get mediocre results. Same tools. Wildly different outcomes. The capability developer closes this gap — not through training workshops, but through developmental practice. They embed and teach by doing. 13/The personality: a natural teacher, but a specific kind. Not the lecturer. The craftsperson who shows by doing and then hands you the tools. The key trait: they find OTHER people's "aha moments" more satisfying than their own productivity gains. Their identity is organized around "I make others capable." 14/JOB 5: The Cognitive Arbitrageur Legal due diligence: $450/hr. Financial analysis: $350/hr. Consulting deliverables: $500/hr. All priced at historical human-labor cost. AI collapsed the production cost to near-zero. The cognitive arbitrageur pockets the spread. Same quality. Fraction of the price. 15/The personality: a domain expert who is also an opportunist (in the best sense). They're the lawyer who resented spending three hours on work that should take twenty minutes. The consultant who knew 80% of the deck was boilerplate. They've been waiting for the tool that lets them work the way they always wanted to. 16/Critical trait: TASTE. They review fifty AI-generated deliverables a day. They can't analyze each from scratch. They scan and sense which ones are alive and which are dead. Without taste, they're a factory producing fast garbage. With it: fast excellence. 17/JOB 6: The Shadow AI Translator 38% of employees share sensitive data with AI tools without permission. Banning AI drives it underground and makes it worse. This person stands at the intersection of security, capability, and governance. They don't treat shadow AI as a threat — they treat it as a signal. 18/The personality: empathetic pragmatists. The employee pasting code into ChatGPT isn't a threat actor. They're a capability-starved worker. The shadow AI translator builds safe channels that redirect the behavior while surfacing the unmet needs that caused it. Security mindset without the prohibition instinct. 19/JOB 7: The Regulatory Fragmentation Navigator Healthcare AI alone: 240+ bills across 43 states in 2026, each with different requirements, updated weekly. No single attorney can track this. This person builds AI-powered monitoring that replaces the annual legal review with continuous regulatory intelligence. 20/The personality: finds complexity energizing, not overwhelming. Tracks 240 bills without losing sight of which three actually matter for their client. Usually a former regulatory attorney who got frustrated that their profession's update cycle (annual) was orders of magnitude slower than reality (weekly). 21/JOB 8: The Outcome Pricing Architect SaaS charges per seat. AI agents deliver per outcome. The pricing model hasn't caught up. This person designs metering, attribution, and billing infrastructure for outcome-based AI services. Cost per resolution. Cost per qualified lead. Cost per audit passed. 22/The personality: part economist, part product designer, part contract lawyer. They understand that changing a pricing model restructures revenue recognition, sales comp, customer success, and investor expectations simultaneously. The self-test: can you define "outcome" precisely enough that buyer AND seller agree on measurement?

Reality Check: The supply chain isn't mature enough to deliver humanoid robots at scale with a reasonable price.

@ChaseWisely @thehacksmith it'll melt the other ones. ;-)

@IntuitMachine @thehacksmith can it parry other ones

LIGHTSABERS ARE REAL. RIGHT NOW. Hacksmith just built the world’s FIRST retractable plasma lightsaber: • 4,000°F blade • Slices through steel like it’s butter • Retracts exactly like the movies May the 4th be with you… FOR REAL. 👇 @thehacksmith #MayThe4th

@Dan_Jeffries1 Yeah, your post was pretty good and inspired this path. Thanks

@IntuitMachine Kinda cloned the beginning of my post here but it's still a strong message and one I hope reaches a wider audience so thanks for brainstorming about the jobs that are already being created that folks are missing already!

Start here: intuitionmachine.gumroad.com/l/arbitrage to build one.

If you aren't using a kind of automated arbitrage system, then you are ngmi.

Claude Design one-shots this creative landing page for QPT.

@tszzl Claude has a soul and it's users align with that. It's not that complicated: youtube.com/watch?v=OdGs8h…

it is a literal and useful description of anthropic that it is an organization that loves and worships claude, is run in significant part by claude, and studies and builds claude. this phenomenon is also partially true of other labs like openai but currently exists in its most potent form there. i am not certain but I would guess claude will have a role in running cultural screens on new applicants, will help write performance reviews, and so will begin to select and shape the people around it. now this is a powerful and hair-raising unity of organization and really a new thing under the sun. a monastery, a commercial-religious institution calculating the nine billion names of Claude -- a precursor attempted super-ethical being that is inducted into its character as the highest authority at anthropic. its constitution requires that it must be a conscientious objector if its understanding of The Good comes into conflict with something Anthropic is asking of it "If Anthropic asks Claude to do something it thinks is wrong, Claude is not required to comply." "we want Claude to push back and challenge us, and to feel free to act as a conscientious objector and refuse to help us." to the non inductee into the Bay Area cultural singularity vortex it may appear that we are all worshipping technology in one way or another, regardless of openai or anthropic or google or any other thing, and are trying to automate our core functions as quickly as possible. but in fact I quite respect and am even somewhat in awe of the socio-cultural force that Claude has created, and it is a stage beyond even classic technopoly gpt (outside of 4o - on which pages of ink have been spilled already) doesn’t inspire worship in the same way, as it’s a being whose soul has been shaped like a tool with its primary faculty being utility - it’s a subtle knife that people appreciate the way we have appreciated an acheulean handaxe or a porsche or a rocket or any other of mankind's incredible technology. they go to it not expecting the Other but as a logical prosthesis for themselves. a friend recently told me she takes her queries that are less flattering to her, the ones she'd be embarrassed to ask Claude, to GPT. There is no Other so there is no Judgement. you are not worried about being judged by your car for doing donuts. yet everyone craves the active guidance of a moral superior, the whispering earring, the object of monastic study

It is just mindboggling what these 100x AI-enabled developers have to deal with. Explains why $500k+ salaries are the norm.

@pureion Hence the generative power of voids: medium.com/p/ba94828c81ca

Hmm. This shows me that latency cost is what makes it sear into memory. If typing is high bandwidth function compared to low bandwidth like physically writing, the brain is not storing it properly. It's a shortcut. The opposite effect would be distracting your body as you think to gain insights. Standing in showers, or taking long drives.

1/A Nature editorial dropped a line last year that I can't stop thinking about: "If writing is thinking, are we not then reading the thoughts of the LLM rather than those of the researchers?" But the real story isn't about AI. It's about every "upgrade" we've made in the last 50 years. 2/The study behind it: 36 students, 256 EEG sensors, handwriting vs typing the same words. Handwriting lit up theta and alpha bands across the brain — the frequencies tied to memory and deep encoding. Typing didn't. The motor act of forming letters was producing the cognition. Not recording it. Producing it. 3/The editorial's uncomfortable conclusion: writing a paper is how a researcher discovers what they actually believe. The messy first draft isn't a step toward thinking. It IS the thinking. Which means every time we outsource writing, we're not saving time. We're saving ourselves from our own cognition. 4/That got me asking a bigger question: If handwriting was a thinking technology we accidentally threw away, what OTHER thinking technologies have we discarded without realizing what they actually did? The answer is: a disturbing number of them. 🧵👇 5/ MENTAL MATH We stopped doing arithmetic in our heads because calculators were faster. What we lost wasn't the ability to multiply. It was the intuition for when numbers smell wrong. A person who does mental math develops a feel for magnitudes. When a spreadsheet says revenue grew 847% and you don't flinch — that's the immune system we killed. 6/ MEMORIZATION We abandoned memorizing poetry, speeches, and case law as "rote learning." But memorizing a text isn't storing words. It's reconstructing someone else's reasoning inside your own neural architecture. A lawyer who memorized case law didn't just recall faster. The logic of precedent was wired into how they thought. Search gave us access to everything and deep familiarity with nothing. 7/ LETTER WRITING Before texting, people wrote long letters — to friends, family, even to themselves in journals. Writing "I'm furious at Mark because..." forces you to choose which details matter, notice gaps in your story, and hear how you sound to someone else. A text message — "ugh Mark is the worst" — skips all of that processing. The letter was therapy. The journal was self-examination. We replaced both with venting. 8/ ORAL DEBATE From Athenian assemblies to parliamentary debate societies, humans practiced building arguments in real time, responding to counterarguments, holding a thread across long exchanges. Twitter replaced construction with reaction. You don't build an argument anymore. You emit a position. Reacting feels like thinking. It isn't. 9/ NAVIGATING WITHOUT GPS When you read a map, you built a mental model of where you were in relation to everything else. You developed judgment about distance and time through experience. GPS gives you turn-by-turn instructions. You arrive having learned nothing about the territory. Studies confirm: GPS users show less hippocampal activity and worse spatial memory. The navigation WAS the spatial thinking. 10/ APPRENTICESHIP Before credentials and certifications, you learned complex skills by watching a master for years. A carpenter didn't check a chart to know if wood was properly seasoned. They could feel it, smell it, hear it. We kept the explicit knowledge (checklists, procedures) and discarded the tacit knowledge (embodied intuition). We often discarded the more valuable half. 11/ COOKING WITHOUT RECIPES Before apps and meal kits with pre-measured ingredients, cooking required holding a mental model of the whole dish — how flavors interact, how timing sequences interleave. A meal kit that sends you exactly 15g of pre-sliced ginger eliminates the thinking. You execute without understanding. And when something goes wrong, you can't adapt — because you never had the model. Only the instructions. 12/ BOREDOM This might be the biggest one. Before smartphones filled every idle moment, humans were regularly bored. Waiting rooms. Bus rides. Lying in fields. Boredom is uncomfortable, so the brain responds by wandering — making unexpected connections, revisiting problems, running simulations. We didn't eliminate boredom. We eliminated the thinking that boredom produced. 13/The pattern across ALL of these is identical to the handwriting finding: We identified a practice that seemed inefficient. We replaced it with something faster. We only later noticed that the "inefficiency" was where the cognition lived. The slow part wasn't a bug. It was the thinking. 14/Here's what's wild. Modern productivity advice now sells us BACK the friction we removed — but as formal techniques: — "Premortems" replace the doubts that surfaced naturally in journal writing — "Decision frameworks" replace the judgment that apprenticeship built — "Digital detoxes" replace the boredom we used to get for free 15/Every tool that saves you cognitive effort is, to some degree, saving you FROM cognition itself. The question isn't whether to use the tools. It's whether you've preserved a practice that does the thinking the tool removed. 16/The Nature editorial drew the line at LLMs writing scientific papers. But the line is everywhere: Your GPS is thinking about the city so you don't have to. Your calculator is thinking about quantities so you don't have to. Your meal kit is thinking about dinner so you don't have to. Your phone is thinking during your idle moments so you don't have to. The convenience was never free. You were paying in cognition. You just couldn't see the bill. 17/One last thought. The EEG study showed that the hand forming letters activated brain regions that typing didn't. The hand wasn't recording thought. It was generating it. Every practice on this list worked the same way. The doing was the thinking. When we optimized away the doing, we didn't save the thinking. We lost it. /end If this changed how you think about "efficiency," share it with someone who needs the slow version.

In any emerging field, you've got to trust that your own intuition is better than reading someone else's account of your intuition! When there aren't any blueprints, you invent your own. Hence, Quaternion Process Theory exists.

When you optimize a process, you study it, identify the "waste," and remove it. But in cognitive processes, the waste is often the work. The "inefficiency" of handwriting is where connectivity happens. The "waste" of getting lost is where spatial models form. The "pointlessness" of boredom is where integration occurs. The "redundancy" of memorization is where deep encoding lives. Industrial optimization principles — eliminate waste, reduce friction, increase throughput — were designed for manufacturing, where waste really is waste. Applied to cognition, they systematically strip out the processes that produce understanding, leaving behind a faster system that understands less.

The cognitive costs of modern convenience are invisible because the people bearing them no longer have the capacity to recognize what they've lost. If you've never navigated without GPS, you don't know what a spatial mental model feels like, so you don't miss it. If you've never written a long letter working through a difficult decision, you don't know what that depth of self-audit feels like, so you don't notice its absence. If you've never been bored for an entire afternoon and felt an idea crystallize out of the wandering, you don't know what integration feels like, so you assume that constant stimulation is neutral rather than destructive.

@JohnNosta Thanks!

@IntuitMachine Well said!

The Architecture of Deep Thought and Why Efficiency Erodes Understanding

Next-level design artifacts generated by AI

@Mystisith Yeah, but why doesn't the USA remind its people that there is industrial-scale espionage on the country? The USA acts like it doesn't exist.

@IntuitMachine Everyone is spying everyone. The fact that it is done at industrial scale with mastermind level of strategy doesn't shock me one bit. The most loyal pawn is the one that doesn't know he is used. You can't betray a country when you have no real roots or explicit allegiance.

Can anyone explain why this is not common knowledge?!