A Generalist Renaissance

A friend said to me recently, “I feared the future would be run by engineers.”

For a while, that felt plausible. The world was getting more technical, more optimized, more brittle. Specialization looked inevitable.

But the age of AI is bending things differently.

Another friend said, half-joking, “Why does Claude Code make me feel like I can take over the world?”
Nothing has ever resonated more.

As execution becomes cheap and fluent, what grows scarce is judgment: deciding what matters, how parts relate, and where tradeoffs hide. Not knowing how to do a thing, but knowing what is worth doing at all.

That kind of thinking has never belonged to specialists alone.

This moment feels like a renaissance for generalists—for synthesis, sensemaking, and design.

I’m still thinking my way into what this means. But I’m increasingly convinced: the future won’t be run by engineers.

It will be navigated by those who can see across domains, hold uncertainty, and exercise judgment when the map runs out.

Author’s note: This piece was written with the help of generative AI, used as a thinking partner to explore framings, surface assumptions, and refine language. AI-generated outputs were treated as provisional material, not authoritative conclusions; all judgment and final decisions remain my own.