AI Makes Work Easier, And Growth Harder

AI is making it radically easier to produce impressive work, but it is quietly removing the friction that used to build judgment.

The boring repetition, the dead ends, the rewrites, the debugging, the slow iteration, that was where pattern recognition came from. Over time, pattern recognition became taste. Taste became judgment. And judgment is what makes someone effective when the situation is messy and unclear.

Now we can generate outputs in minutes, but that speed can bypass the thinking that the output was meant to develop. You can look experienced on the outside while the foundations are still missing.

The shift is simple but uncomfortable: learning is no longer a side effect of doing the job. If you want to grow, you have to design your own practice. Study systems, not tasks. Ship real work and reflect on what AI got right and wrong. And seek out visible reasoning from people with stronger judgment so you can learn how they think, not just what they decided. Check out my full article below.

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Enabling the Team

AI Makes Work Easier, And Growth Harder by Rory Madden
Today, a designer can generate fifteen variations in fifteen minutes. The output is faster, and the quality is often higher. But something essential is missing: the learning that used to come from the struggle. This is the central paradox of the AI era.

Middle Managers Feel The Least Psychological Safety At Work by Jan U. Hagen and Bin Zhao
To restore learning and agility, companies must redesign accountability systems, normalize fallibility from the top, and build stronger communities of practice for the middle layer.

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