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Surviving the Great Commoditizer: Stop Getting ‘Good’ at ChatGPT

Jun22025

I know, it’s been a while.  For anyone wondering if I’d given up the blogging habit, I haven’t.  I just forgot how to read for a bit.

Luckily, however, I have a 4-year old that loves Dr Seuss, so that’s gotten me back on track and no worse for the wear, except for my new penchant to follow people around like an absolute maniac, trying to get them to eat eggs and ham.

Instead of returning to form with one of the many productive tutorials I have in mind, today I rant.  But I think it will be productive and even help some of you reading.

I’m going to do a deep-dive on why I think getting ‘good’ at ChatGPT (my stand-in for all LLM techs) isn’t the flex you might think, and why it’s quite likely actively bad for your career.  But I’ll also offer my take on what to do instead, that will be good for your career.

Before that, however, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover about who, exactly, this advice is for (digital technicians) and how, exactly, commoditization works in the form of a commoditization lifecycle.

Caveat 1: "Life-Good" vs "Career-Good"

But before either of those caveats, let me caveat the idea of "don’t get good."

In a vacuum, being good at something is better than not being good at something, and ChatGPT is no exception.  But career development doesn’t take place in a vacuum.

To understand the distinction, ask yourself whether you’re good at shoveling dirt.  Are you completely inept?  Okay at it, you guess?  A shoveling craftsperson?

In a vacuum, if you could wave a magic wand and be one of these 3 things, you’d obviously choose the latter.  Who wouldn’t?

And that skill might even matter to your life.  If you have 15 minutes before the police arrive and you need to bury some critical evidence, then being the Michelangelo of shoveling may represent the single most important skill you ever acquire in your life.

But that doesn’t mean you should try to define your career around it, or even involve it in your career as a first-class goal.

Caveat 2: Technicians and Their Meritocracy Mythology

Speaking of careers and goals, let’s define the term "technician."  I’m using this term, as coined by Michael Gerber in his book, the E-Myth, Revisited, about entrepreneurship.  Here’s a longer read about the personalities, but briefly:

Entrepreneur is the visionary that looks at the future, imagines the possible, and strikes deals on behalf of the organization.

Manager is the planner, who minds the P&L and looks to maintain a stable and sustainable status quo.

Technician is the doer, who values craft and tends to live by the motto, "if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right."

Gerber’s book is a fascinating and eye-opening read (if a little woo-woo at the end for my personal taste) and I recommend it.  But the tl;dr of the early chapters is that most people who start businesses or freelance practices aren’t really entrepreneurs; they’re technicians who have an "entrepreneurial seizure," usually of the form "you idiots are all doing the thing wrong, so I quit and I’m going to go off on my own and do the thing the right way."

For our purposes today, the manager and entrepreneur aren’t relevant, mainly because neither archetype is in danger of LLM-flavored commoditization.  But the technician — especially the digital technician — sure is.

To make it concrete, technicians are, broadly, individual contributors (ICs) that sell labor in the market and create concrete deliverables or, at least, billable services.  Think software developers, content writers, graphic designers, accountants, etc.

Another way to think of technicians is as people with a (digital) craft.  They may or may not celebrate (or, arguably, fetishize) the idea of themselves as craftspeople, but it’s generally their mental model for their work.

Busting The Meritocracy Myth: ‘Better’ is Just "Cheaper, with Extra Steps"

This mental model gives rise to a pervasive, understandable myth about the nature of their work and its value.  Here’s the myth:

Being good at your craft is economically valuable.

Yes, you’re reading that right.  I am calling that statement a myth.  (I’ve written about this for years, at length in articles like these, if you want a deep-dive).

To demonstrate, rather than lengthy explanations about diminishing marginal returns or game theory around fungible labor, here’s a realistic hypothetical conversation.  These days a lot of my readers are marketers, so that might go over better.

Client : why should I pay you for {blog post, code, graphics, etc} when I can find someone on Fiverr to do it for half the cost!?

Technician : well, you see, because I’m better than they are at the thing!

Client : who cares?

Technician : you should, because if they do it badly, then you’re going to...