You can't beat AI.
AI is smarter & cheaper every year. Do you?
Your salary is being compared to a subscription now.
A subscription to an intelligence.
And the intelligent subscription is getting cheaper than your intelligence.
By cheaper, I don’t mean twice as cheap. I mean, 6,000x cheaper in 4 years:
A few years ago, if a company needed a decent memo, a market scan, a spreadsheet, a landing page, a sales email, a first draft, a summary, a slide outline, a contract review, or 20 ideas for a campaign, they needed a human.
Usually an expensive one.
Now they need a prompt. Maybe 30 seconds. Maybe $20/month.
And the output is… fine.
Sometimes good.
Sometimes better than the junior person they hired last year.
That’s why junior jobs are simply crashing:
And you can’t say it out loud.
→ The threat is not that AI becomes perfect.
→ The threat is that AI becomes cheap enough to replace good enough.
So the question is no longer: “Will AI replace me?”
Boring question. The better one:
What happens when the thing you used to sell becomes almost free?
That’s what we need to talk about.
Because if you understand this, you can stay ahead. If you don’t, you’ll keep asking for better prompts or tools while the market decides on a cheaper/faster option.
Two things before we start:
Don’t save this guide and forget it. Book 20 minutes in your week to act on it. Pick one section today and apply it to your actual work.
Share this article to your peers. I believe more people need to know. Do you?
PS: This newsletter grows from your shares. And I keep hitting 1,000+ shares! It’s my weekly north star. Sharing is free & helps me stay laser focused on mastering AI for you.
The crashing cost of intelligence.
I was the smartest kid in school (up until highschool).
I was - and still am? - very proud of my intelligence.
I am not the tallest. I am not the strongest. But I definitely shine with intelligence.
So what happens when the thing that defines me the most gets so cheap I can no longer compete? I want to answer this daunting question today.
Most knowledge work was priced around 3 hidden costs:
The cost to know enough.
The cost to think through the work.
The cost to produce the final thing.
AI attacks all 3.
It knows enough to start.
It thinks enough to draft.
It produces enough to make you uncomfortable.
And yes, it still makes mistakes. But cheap tools don’t need to be perfect.
They need to be good enough for people to use them 100 times more.
When something useful gets cheaper, people use more of it.
More drafts.
More tests.
More research.
More prototypes.
More analysis.
More cold emails.
More content.
More dashboards.
More legal first passes.
More financial models.
More everything.
It’s commonly known as the Jevon’s Paradox.
Jevon’s Paradox: Technological advancements increase the efficiency with which a resource is used, the total consumption of that resource often increases rather than decreases. This occurs because lower costs unlock new demand.
This is why I don’t think AI means “less work.”
I think it means more work gets attempted.
The lazy prediction is: AI replaces people. The better prediction is: AI increases the amount of work humans are expected to manage.
And that creates a new problem → intelligence is becoming a commodity.
You won’t lose because AI can think.
You’ll lose because everyone around you can suddenly think 100 times more often, and you’re still working like in the past, when thinking was expensive.
Intelligence used to be a bottleneck.
Think about how work used to happen.
Someone had an idea.
Then they waited.
Waited for the analyst.
Waited for the designer.
Waited for the writer.
Waited for the intern to summarize the report.
Waited for the consultant to make the deck.
Waited for the developer to build the prototype.
Waited for the manager to review the memo.
Every project had bottlenecks.
And many of those bottlenecks were just expensive intelligence.
Someone had to read.
Someone had to think.
Someone had to write.
Someone had to format.
Someone had to check.
Now the first pass is (almost) free.
→ That doesn’t mean the final work is free.
→ It means the first (serious) attempt is free.
Huge difference.
Because once first attempts are cheap, the number of attempts explodes.
Before AI, you might test 1 headline.
→ Now you test 50.
Before AI, you might read 3 competitor pages.
→ Now you scan 300.
Before AI, you might make 1 client deck.
→ Now you make 4 versions for 4 different buyers.
Before AI, you might ask one analyst for one answer.
→ Now you ask 10 questions you never would have asked because it wasn’t worth anyone’s time.
That’s why “AI is cheap” really means “impossible volume is now possible”.
And if the volume changes, the job changes.
Average dies first.
AI is very good at average.
Average memo.
Average sales email.
Average research summary.
Average content calendar.
Average Python script.
Average slide outline.
Average customer support answer.
Average job description.
Average legal summary.
Average market analysis.
Average “strategy.”
I’m using the word average on purpose.
Average used to be enough.
Average looked professional because it took time.
Now, average looks suspicious because it took 12 seconds.
Did you just use ChatGPT to do this?
The worst sentence you could receive, from anyone. Especially a client.
This single mentality change is the beginning of the collapse of (some, or most?) knowledge workers. They used to have a moat made of effort.
You had to sit there.
You had to type.
You had to know the format.
You had to search.
You had to assemble the pieces.
AI removed pretty much everything. And is doing it even faster. Even cheaper.
So now the market looks at average and thinks, “Why am I paying a human for this?”
Painful. But also useful.
It tells you exactly what to do next:
Stop trying to make average work. Move above it.
Judgment is the new work.
When intelligence gets cheap, judgment gets expensive.
Everyone can generate options → Few people can pick.
Everyone can draft → Few people can decide what should exist.
Everyone can summarize → Few people can tell what matters.
Everyone can make a slide → Few people can make the one that closes.
The valuable person is no longer the person who can produce the first version.
The valuable person is the one who can look at 20 versions and say:
“This one.”
“This angle.”
“This risk.”
“This is wrong.”
“This will fail with our buyer.”
“This sounds good, but solves nothing.”
“This should never be sent.”
That’s taste. And taste is trained by doing the work.
Thousands of reps. Bad calls. Awkward meetings. Failed launches. Clients who didn’t buy. Readers who didn’t care (hi! if it’s you). Bosses who killed the project. Users who clicked the wrong button.
AI has read about those things. You lived them.
It’s an important gap, that will get more and more expensive.
You must find a way to extract your taste and give it to AI.
Because if your taste stays trapped in your head, AI can’t work with it.
You need to turn your expertise into something AI can work with:
Your expertise needs to become files.
If you want to stay ahead, start turning your expertise into reusable context.
It goes beyond simply not repeating “I work as a [job] at [company]”.
It’s giving AI as much context as you can. What you love, hate, the secrets of your best work. Your standards. Your taste. Your scars. Your audience. Your rules. Your mistakes. Your constraints. The weird little things only you know.
Put them in markdown files (a text file AI loves) → then give them to AI before important tasks → tou’re feeding AI the part it can’t scrape from the internet → that’s how you stop getting the average answer.
A prompt is a one-time request. But a file (inside a folder) is reusable memory.
So I keep coming back to this, because it works.
Here’s the folder I built for my Claude Cowork. But it works with other AI by just uploading all the files into a “Project”.
I wrote an extensive, free guide on how to set up Claude Cowork here.
I know it’s annoying to read a newsletter that asks you to read another newsletter. But that would make each and everyone of them horribly long. I’m sure you understand.
ABOUT-ME/
- about-me.md
- anti-ai-writing-style.md
- my-company.md
TEMPLATES/
- examples-i-love.md
- examples-i-hate.md
- [whatever example of work you love here]
- [whatever example of work you love here]
- [whatever example of work you love here]
OUTPUTS/
- [whatever AI produces, it's here]
- [whatever AI produces, it's here]
- [whatever AI produces, it's here]Keep it small. Please don’t dump 400 PDFs into a folder and call it context.
It looks like this inside Claude:
Now that your folder is ready, time to prompt it:
A good prompt is actually quite simple…
… if you have the right folder and file system.
Just open Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, whatever you use.
Paste this:
I want to [task] for [success criteria].
Start by reading my about-me folder and its files.
Then, ask me questions to complete your task with my answers.
This will feel slow. Good. It takes time to transfer taste.
Most people want AI to skip thinking. You want AI to extract your thinking.
Once you do it on a large scale, you start understanding where most of your value is: it’s not the manual work, but your unique way of thinking.
So stop selling hours. Start selling taste.
Stop selling hours.
“I spent 6 hours on this.” “I worked all weekend.” “This took me 3 days.”
Nobody cares.
I say this with love because I’ve done it too.
Time spent used to signal quality because production was expensive.
Now production is cheap. So time spent is a weak argument.
The better argument is:
“I understood the real problem.”
“I knew what to ignore.”
“I found the missing risk.”
“I made the decision easier.”
“I shipped the version that worked.”
“I saved the team from doing the wrong thing beautifully.”
That is what stays expensive.
Outcomes. Taste. Trust. Responsibility.
Move from answer person to system person.
The answer person gets replaced first. Someone asks a question.
→ They answer.
Someone needs a draft.
→ They draft.
Someone needs research.
→ They research.
That work used to be useful. Now AI does much of it.
The system person asks a better question: “Why do we keep needing this?”
Then they build the repeatable way to handle it.
A template.
A checklist.
A context file.
A project folder.
A recurring review.
A workflow.
A trained AI setup for the team.
A way for other people to get 80% of the answer without asking them.
That’s how you stay ahead.
You stop being the bottleneck. You remove bottlenecks.
Here’s the prompt:
Here are 5 tasks people keep asking me to do:
[PASTE TASKS]
That's exactly how I do it, step by step, with each tools explained:
[PASTE YOUR EXACT STEPS]
For each task:
1. Identify the repeated pattern
2. Tell me what context files are needed
3. Turn it into a reusable checklist
4. Draft the first version of the workflow
5. Tell me what should stay humanAI builds systems. And I’m not talking about the monster-automation sending emails on your behalf to your loved ones. But simple recurring tasks.
The key play is to work with AI on what you can judge best.
Use AI where you already have taste.
People use AI backward.
They go: “I’m bad at this. AI will do it.”
Dangerous.
If you’re bad at the thing, you can’t judge the thing.
You’ll approve clean garbage. Use AI where you already have taste.
If you’re great at sales, use AI to draft 20 sales angles.
→ You’ll know which 19 are weak.
If you’re great at finance, use AI to test your model.
→ You’ll catch the lazy assumption.
If you’re great at writing, use AI to produce raw material.
→ You’ll cut the fake voice.
If you’re great at operations, use AI to map workflows.
→ You’ll see the missing handoff.
Your skill becomes the steering wheel.
Because yes, humans still win.
You stay ahead by getting good at the things cheap intelligence doesn’t automatically solve:
Knowing what should exist.
Knowing what should be ignored.
Knowing who needs to trust it.
Knowing what will fail in the real world.
Knowing when the answer sounds right but is wrong.
Knowing how to make the work fit your exact context.
Taking responsibility when the output matters.
That last one is the big one.
I pay my lawyers to take responsibility. Be like my lawyer.
AI is a lonely experience.
You’re facing your computer, by yourself, at work.
You can’t really brag about using AI. But you can’t really skip it either.
So you quickly open it and try to do your best work, by yourself.
You can’t ask your coworkers how to do better. It’s touchy. It’s literally your job. And the entire company keeps pushing for “AI champions”.
AI is such a lonely experience.
That’s why I started this newsletter, ‘How to AI’.
I was trying to make sense of LLMs (like GPT), but only devs had a community.
I do believe anyone reading this newsletter - for free - can make the most of it. Read, twice a week, a completely free guide on how to use AI. Book a 20-minute meeting with yourself every week if needed.
This is the “I do it myself” option.
Now, if you want the “Do it with us” option, join my Circle.
You’d have to pay for my Substack (it’s $200/year), and you will get:
1 - An invite to my private Circle channel (this is the best value for money).
2 - $219 worth of AI tools I partner with (like Gamma, Wispr Flow, Granola…).
Subscribe to my Substack to join my Circle here:
P.S. There is also the option of “I do it for you.”
I consult enterprises in the US to make them adopt AI (Claude) faster.
We run workshops for teams of at least 50 people.
We deploy engineers where automation is needed.
We make sure AI works, and keeps working for people (your best asset).
I have already taken care of 14 businesses since January, but we are not live yet!
If you want to make sure to have a spot before I go live, shoot me a DM here:
My team will make sure you qualify first!
Until then, I am rooting for you, the human, to master AI before it masters you.
Humanly yours,
Ruben.
I've been using AI for a year now, and what changed for me was this: i’m no longer amazed by what it could produce and started noticing what it got wrong.
And what it got wrong, most of the time, was the judgment call. It's technically fine, but it still doesn't know what to leave out.
So I agree with you, Ruben, humans will win.
Thnx for an insightful SS @Ruben. It's knowing when, where, how and why you're using the tool you're using to fulfill a brief right?