When Intelligence Is on Tap, Judgment Becomes the Work

When intelligence is always available, producing something is no longer the challenge. Deciding what is worth doing is.

At Adage, data engineer Christofer Bäcklin sees that shift in the day-to-day work. A few years ago, much of the time went into getting things to run. Debugging systems, navigating documentation, resolving blockers before anything meaningful could happen.

“Before, you could get stuck for hours, sometimes a full day, just trying to get something to run,” he says. “That doesn’t really happen anymore.” What has disappeared is not the work itself, but the friction that used to slow it down.

Something else has taken its place.

“It’s a bit like being in an orchestra where someone suddenly hands out a new instrument to everyone,” Christofer says. “Most people don’t know how to play it yet, but everyone is trying. And every now and then, someone does something that makes you realize how far it can go.”

You move faster. You get unstuck. The work starts earlier. The shift is not just speed. It is scale.

“It’s not like things are just a bit faster,” he says. “It’s a completely different level of volume.” He pauses. “You don’t play a Stradivarius violin anymore. You play a thousand synthesizers.”

Once output reaches that level, the question changes. Not how to produce, but what to produce at all.

“The machine can build almost anything,” he says. “But it doesn’t know what matters. It doesn’t have a goal. You do.” That responsibility becomes clearer, not smaller.

“There is a common worry that AI will make us think less,” Christofer says. “My experience is the opposite. I have never thought as hard as I do now.” When implementation is no longer the bottleneck, the work shifts upstream.

“You spend less time on syntax and scaffolding, and more time asking whether you are solving the right problem in the first place.”

AI does not resolve ambiguity. It amplifies it. “People think it will clean things up for them,” Christofer says. “But if you start with a mess, you just get more mess, faster.” If you know what you are doing, you move very fast. If you don’t, you just scale confusion.

The baseline is moving. Things that once looked like specialist expertise are now widely available. Certain types of smartness are no longer scarce.

“When intelligence is on tap, the question becomes: What do you bring to the table?”

That is where the role of the specialist sharpens. Not in producing more, but in defining direction. Knowing what to prioritize and how to structure the work so it leads somewhere meaningful.

“The real question is not what you can build,” he says. “It’s why you’re building it, and whether it actually matters.”

The gap becomes clear. Some will use AI to build Rube Goldberg machines. Others to scale their own know-how. The difference is not in the tools, but in how the work is framed.

Most work will move toward volume. Fast, accessible, good enough. That is where the baseline ends up. The specialist is defined by what still requires judgment.

As output becomes easy, it also becomes easier to produce the wrong things at scale. The middle ground disappears.

“When intelligence is on tap,” Christofer says, “what matters is what you choose to do with it.”