Building Real Skills During the AI Boom - No, Not That Kind of Skill

The Coding-Is-My-Value Trap: For years, we've treated the ability to write code as the flagship skill of software engineering. It's concrete, it's teachable, it's the thing big box stores sell kits for. But conflating "what I enjoy about the job" with "what I'm actually valuable for" is dangerously reductive — and AI is now exposing that gap. The Skills You've Been Discounting: Domain expertise, systems thinking, risk and bottleneck analysis, organizational design, tech-lead-level sequencing of work, relational skills that unblock hard moments in a company's life. These have always been where a lot of your real value lived. You probably just we...