You're Doing Just Fine With AI. Here's How I Know.

There’s a group chat I’m in where, among many other things, we share how we’re using AI. The other day, a few of them were deep in a thread about building agents to supervise other agents — GitHub, Claude Code, the whole setup. I was completely lost. I asked Claude to explain what they were doing, and I still couldn’t wrap my head around it.

I write about AI for a living. I run trainings on it. And in that chat, I felt like I was behind.

Now the other half. A month ago, I was in Ohio teaching election officials about AI. The room was a mix — some true beginners, others who’d been playing with the tools for a while. Afterward, person after person told me the presentation made it easier to understand how they could actually use AI in their work and where to start. To that room, I’m the one who’s far ahead.

Same person. Same tools. The only thing that changed was who I was standing next to.

My read: the feeling of being behind isn’t information about where you actually are. It’s information about where you’re looking. Everyone is standing on a different rung of the same ladder, staring up at the person above them. The friends building multi-agent systems? They’re looking up at someone too. There is no rung where the feeling stops.

A while back, I wrote a piece called You’re Not Going to Be Replaced by AI. You’re Going to Be Lapped. I stand by it. But here’s what I should have said more clearly: the people doing the lapping aren’t the ones who started first. They’re the ones who keep going. Starting today puts you in that group. Refusing to start because you’re “too far behind” is the only move that actually leaves you behind.

But that raises the harder question: how do you actually know you’re fine and not just telling yourself you are?

Below the paywall: the three markers I look for that tell me someone’s doing just fine with AI, drawn from the trainings I’ve run for election officials and tech executives and the specific first move I’d give you depending on which rung of the ladder you’re standing on. It’s the same place I start when organizations pay me to teach this.