AI is blurring the boundaries between engineering, design, strategy, and operations—everyone is becoming a generalist with a specialty, and the bottleneck shifts to ideas and taste.

Akshay argues that AI enables anyone to operate across disciplines—engineering, design, strategy—so the classic T-shaped skill model evolves: everyone has a deeper specialty on one axis, but AI lets them broaden horizontally. The scarce resource becomes not building skill but having grounded ideas and good taste. ✦ AI generated

Akshay Nathan · Latent Space · 2026-07-28 · original ↗

I think my suspicion is that everyone will be shaped in a way that AI will enable everyone to become a generalist. Things that I never would be able to come up with a design before, even now I don't have maybe the visual taste required, but I can iterate on something with the help of AI. But then people will have a specialty, and that's the straight line in the T or the upward line in the T. So you can have a specialty that you're interested in—with the help of AI, you can go deeper and become better at it over time, but then you'll also be a generalist. And so with that foundation, the way you can accomplish is almost limitless. I think the bottleneck becomes ideas and taste. Because anyone can build now, it really is the era of bottoms-up ambition. And because there's so much to be built, you're always gonna be bottlenecked by the amount of ideas and amount of things that you're doing at any given time.

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