AI won’t make everyone equal. It will make the gap between exceptional and average wider than ever.
The Reality
There’s a comforting story floating around the tech world right now. It goes like this: AI tools will level the playing field. Junior developers will code like seniors. Non-technical people will build like engineers. Everyone will be elevated.
Max Brodeur-Urbas, founder of Gumloop, an automation platform processing 4 million workflows daily for Instacart, Shopify, and DoorDash, sees something different happening.
“It’s possible that the last generation of great engineers has been born,” he says. “Because there was this era of actually needing to understand what’s going on and then getting accelerated by AI. But now people can skip the understanding part and just accelerate.”
The people who learned the fundamentals first, who understand why things work and not just how to make them work, are now getting turbocharged by AI. They’re becoming exceptional at a speed that wasn’t possible before.
Everyone else is generating slop.
The Shift
AI creates a fork in the road, not a rising tide.
On one path: people who use AI as a learning tool. They pause. They try to understand the problem. They ask AI to teach them what they don’t know. They build on genuine comprehension.
On the other path: people who use AI as a shortcut. Their website works. The feature does what they wanted. But they never took the time to understand why it worked, what could break, or what knock-on effects it might create.
The Old Way: Everyone needed to learn the fundamentals. The bar was high. Progress was slow but solid.
The New Reality: You can skip the fundamentals entirely. Your code compiles. Your app runs. But you’re building on a foundation you can’t see, can’t debug, and can’t improve.
“It’s so easy to just not want to understand why something works,” Max says. “Your website worked, the feature did what you wanted, but you didn’t take the time to really dig into why.”
This is the trap. AI makes it effortless to skip understanding. And skipping understanding feels productive in the moment. You shipped the feature. You launched the product. But when something breaks in a way the AI can’t fix, you’re stuck.
“If you can actually have the determination to pause, try to understand the problem, have AI teach you the things you don’t understand, you’ll become exceptional even faster than before. And then the average person will just kind of fall to the slop.”
What To Do Next
The next time AI gives you a solution that works, don’t move on. Spend five minutes understanding why it works.
Ask the AI to explain its reasoning. Change one variable and see what breaks. Read the output instead of just running it.
This is the new competitive advantage. Not using AI. Everyone will use AI. The advantage is using AI while maintaining the discipline to actually learn from it.
The engineers, marketers, analysts, and operators who do this will pull ahead so fast that the gap becomes permanent. The ones who don’t will produce work that looks right on the surface and falls apart under pressure.
The One Thing to Remember
AI doesn’t level the playing field. It amplifies the gap. The people who understand the fundamentals and use AI to go faster will become unreachable. The people who skip understanding will produce impressive-looking work that breaks at the first unexpected input.
This insight comes from “50 AI Agents Running My Company Is a Lie” featuring Max Brodeur-Urbas, founder of Gumloop. The AI Shift curates wisdom from AI leaders for busy professionals navigating the AI era. Are you using AI to learn faster, or to skip learning entirely?
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