I consider myself fortunate to have learned to code when I was very young. That skill stayed with me for decades and for the largest part of my adult life it was what kept bread on the table.

As you already know, I’m seldom writing code nowadays, but I continue coding using the English language, vibe coding iOS apps on my iPad daily. Last week I finished an intense streak, launching 4 apps at a time. Just a year ago, this would have been unthinkable without an entire team behind me. And yet, here I am, doing it.

But let’s stop for a second. Although the delivery happened in time, it wasn’t without bumps. There were problems along the way that needed to be solved, blockers that had to be eliminated and many things happening at once. The difference is that one large part of the process, the actual coding, was compressed in a matter of days. But the rest, well, had to be managed — not for one, not for two, but for four apps at a time.

The New Hard Skills

Coding, the hard skill that survived almost 4 decades in my life, is now obsolete. But discipline, focus, communication — all these “soft” skills are taking prime time now. I was able to push this through by staying on course, identifying bugs and asking for targeted solutions, and just not getting lost in the maze that suddenly exploded around this thing.

Suddenly, what felt like “nice to have” is the key differentiator. Communication is not a soft skill anymore — it’s the fundamental difference between having your product delivered on time or not. You need to communicate clearly to that LLM exactly what you need from it. Vision, or the ability to see a problem from different angles and generate a big picture — a universal map that will encompass your product — is even more important. Now that everything can be done, knowing what NOT to do is fundamental.

Cognitive Frameworks Are The Next Frontier

I’ve been using Assess – Decide – Do, my cognitive framework, for fifteen years. It helped tremendously not only in my day-to-day work, but overall, with my entire life. I’ve been location independent for that same stretch, having lived in 4 countries across 3 continents. That’s not easy. Yet, I was able to do it not only on regular income, but thoroughly enjoying it — and I still do. I give ADD the primary credit for this. It didn’t have some secret sauce or hidden knowledge inside it. It was just enforcing a certain behavior. It was a way of thinking, planning and doing.

Now, these kinds of cognitive frameworks are the ones that are moving the needle. It’s not about those who know the most, because knowledge has just been commoditized — it’s about those who use knowledge in a better, more streamlined way.

So, instead of learning a new programming language or signing up for a new master certification, you’d better start incorporating something like Assess – Decide – Do into your life. It doesn’t necessarily have to be ADD — find something that works for you, but stick with it. That’s your wild card now, not the certifications you earned last year.

The New Rules

In short, here’s how things are going to unfold from now on:

• “Prompting” is just communication. If you can’t communicate clearly with a human, you can’t communicate clearly with an AI. Master this.
• The paradox: as tools get more powerful, the people who thrive aren’t the most technical — they’re the most clear-thinking. Practice cleaning your thinking, not remembering syntax.
• Discipline becomes harder, not easier, when execution is instant. When you can build anything in an afternoon, choosing what NOT to build is the real skill.
• Imagination is the ultimate moat. AI can optimize, iterate, and execute — but it can’t want something that doesn’t exist yet.

The bottlenecks didn’t vanish just because AI can build anything we can imagine. They just moved inside our minds. And that’s actually good news, because we can train our minds.