Build the System or Be Replaced by It

This week I turned 31. No kids yet, just a dog that bites and a startup that hasn’t died yet. Plus two nieces whose birthdays I’m supposed to remember. That feels like enough responsibility for now.

31 doesn’t feel old, but it does feel different.

At 25, it felt like there was unlimited time to become the person I wanted to be. Plenty of time to learn new skills or forge a new path altogether; reinvention was always on the table.

Today that window feels narrower. Not closed, but no longer wide open.

At 25 I felt ahead. Recently, on good days, I feel… parallel. I’m keeping pace with the world, but barely. And the world is starting to pick up speed.

31 has me thinking about the skills I’ve been building the past decade, and whether they still hold up in a world moving faster everyday.

In 2025, it seems it’s no longer enough to be great at the work, you have to design the system that does the work.

Until a few years ago, conventional wisdom said the future belonged to software engineers and statisticians.

But AI has rapidly abstracted those disciplines, packaging them into tools that anyone can master with a decent prompt. Technical chops are still relevant, but they’re no longer the moat they were once revered to be.

Lately I’ve taken some solace in the seemingly enduring value of my core competencies: storytelling, design, taste, product intuition. The things that still felt human; still challenging for machines to fake.

But that comfort is proving temporary.

AI might not be better than you (yet), but it is much faster and much cheaper. And it doesn't need breaks.

So what's left for us mortals?

If you want a glimpse of where this is headed, look at what Meta (Facebook) teased last week.

No matter your demographic or what you’re buying, chances are Meta’s advertising engine shaped your awareness, guided your consideration, or influenced your ultimate decision. Meta doesn’t sell the product, it sells the connection to the consumer, the attention itself. And attention is the lifeblood of modern commerce.

So, when Meta makes a fundamental change to how it captures and monetizes attention, it isn’t a minor product tweak, it’s a seismic shift in how the global digital economy operates.

And last week, that’s exactly what happened.

Meta’s latest product announcement is deceptively simple, yet radically transformative: full-stack, AI-powered advertising. In other words: product photo and budget in, thousands of fully optimized ad variations out. Instantly.

This is vertical integration. Meta isn’t improving advertising, they’re absorbing it. The entire value chain from creative production, audience targeting, media buying, and optimization will soon run autonomously inside Meta’s walls.

No human creative team needed.

This update might sound like ad-tech mumbo-jumbo, but it’s anything but. It marks the beginning of the end for human-led creative execution. A nearly trillion-dollar engine of marketing, analytics, and advertising is about to be distilled into a text input box, patiently waiting for your next prompt.

“Okay, cool, but I don’t work in advertising.”

Advertising is just the first domino.

Meta’s move is a preview of a bigger shift: verticalization through AI. The next decade will belong to those who build the best systems.

If your job can be reduced to clean inputs and clear outputs, someone is already building the system to replace you. To be honest, they’re probably ahead of schedule.

So here is the opportunity: the people that build these systems will capture exponentially more value than the people they replace.

So the real question isn’t: Will AI replace your job?

It’s: Will you be the one designing the system that replaces someone else's?

At 25, building skills felt like the game. Learn fast, stack advantages, sharpen an edge.

The game has changed.

At 31, that edge is dulling faster than I can sharpen it. Not because I’m getting worse, but because the tools available to everyone else have gotten better. Execution, no matter how well done, doesn’t differentiate the way it used to.

Meta’s announcement was a wake-up call.

Creative production, copy, design, targeting, optimization, absorbed into a single engine. What used to take full teams will soon run on prompts and compute. The entire value chain of an industry collapsed into infrastructure. It won’t stop with ads. This pattern is unfolding across every industry that runs on processes.

If you’re still optimizing tasks, you’re playing the wrong game.

The leverage now sits upstream, with those who define how work gets done, not those buried inside it. The edge belongs to people who can turn judgment into systems.

System designers move beyond craft. They extract the business logic, wrap it in workflows, and remove themselves from the loop.

If you can describe your job in steps, it’s already vulnerable. But fear not! The window to move up the stack is still open. Stop polishing the output. Start owning the system.

Because if you’re not building the machine, it’s going to swallow you soon.

Up and to the right.