Now is the time for generalists Ruth Heasman @ruthheasman I…

Now is the time for generalists
Ruth Heasman
@ruthheasman
I've spent most of my adult life feeling like I'm doing career wrong.
You know that advice everyone gives? "Pick a lane." "Focus." "Become an expert." I've heard it a thousand times, nodded along, then immediately gone back to whatever shiny new thing had caught my attention that week. Pattern design on Monday, app development on Tuesday, writing a book on Wednesday, messing about with blockchain on Thursday. My LinkedIn profile reads like someone having a midlife crisis in slow motion.
Turns out I might have accidentally stumbled into the right strategy. Not through wisdom—through an apparent inability to commit to anything.
The game changed while we weren't looking
Here's something that's been nagging at me lately. I keep seeing stories about senior developers with 15 years of experience getting outpaced by the marketing person who learned to use Cursor last month. Not because the marketing person is smarter—they just understood something faster than the rest of us.
We're not in a skills race anymore. We're in a direction, taste, and momentum race. And most of us have been training for the wrong event.
If you make your living with any kind of abstract reasoning—writing, design, development, analysis—you've probably felt that low-grade background anxiety. The quiet worry that maybe you're learning the wrong things. Building the wrong portfolio. Betting on skills that'll be worthless in 18 months.
I've definitely felt it. I've built 50-odd apps this past year and I still sometimes wonder if I'm just arranging deckchairs on the Titanic.
AI is a mirror, not a monster
Here's what I've come to understand: AI is only as good as the data it's trained on. There's always a gap between emerging technologies and AI's ability to work with them. The newest frameworks, the cutting-edge tools—AI is perpetually playing catch-up because it learned from documentation that's already outdated by the time it's published.
But the real insight isn't about AI's limitations. It's about what AI has revealed.
When Midjourney hit and suddenly anyone could generate stunning images on command, it exposed something. Technical rendering skills weren't the valuable part—they never were. Vision and taste are. When AI started writing clean code from prompts, it exposed something else. Syntax was never the valuable part. Architectural thinking and real world problem-solving is.
AI is holding up a mirror. It's showing us what has always been true: tools get replaced, skills get commoditised, we learn new skills. But the impulse to build, invent, create, hone, cure, care, serve, improve and problem-solve? That doesn't get commoditised. It can only be developed through experience, living in and caring about the world, purposeful thinking, and actually doing things.
The generalist's accidental advantage
Consider two people: a senior developer who spent 15 years getting really, really good at writing React components, versus someone from the sales team who spent six months learning to think about product, user experience, and what customers actually need, then used AI to build it.
The senior dev is a specialist whose skills just got commoditised. The sales person is a generalist with agency—and with context that no amount of technical skill can replace.
I'm not saying this to be doomy—I'm genuinely relieved, because I was never going to out-specialist anyone anyway. My attention span wouldn't allow it. But it turns out that being mediocre at lots of things might actually be more useful than being excellent at one thing.
The people succeeding right now aren't the ones who can code the fastest. They're the ones who can see what needs to exist and orchestrate the tools to make it real.
The block size parable
I've watched this play out in the Bitcoin world for years. While the BTC crowd endlessly debates block sizes, transaction fees, and whether Bitcoin should be "digital gold" or actual money, the BSV builders have been quietly getting on with it. Reinventing payment systems. Scaling the network. Building micropayment infrastructure. Shipping applications that simply couldn't exist on a network that costs $5 per transaction.
The BTC maximalists are so busy defending their dogma that they've stopped moving. Meanwhile, the people who decided the debate was settled years ago are now several laps ahead, building things the debaters said were impossible.
This is what's happening right now with AI. While some of us are reading articles debating whether AI tools are "really useful" or waiting for the technology to "mature," other people are already six months deep into building things. While we're wondering if "AI agents" is just marketing hype, someone else is shipping products with agentic workflows and micropayments.
The cautious approach feels sensible. Gather information, weigh options, make an informed decision. But by the time you've finished your analysis, the race is already several laps …