The Skill Soup: Why Specialists Plateau in the AI Era

The career advice I heard for twenty years was to specialize. Pick a niche, go deep, become the person everyone calls. That advice has aged badly. After five months of working alongside AI agents daily, I watch specialists get out-shipped by generalists who combine three or four skills competently. The soup is beating the single ingredient.

Why Specialization Worked

Specialists won the previous era because depth was expensive. It took years to get good at one thing. Once you did, you had a durable advantage. The buyer was paying for hours you'd already invested.

AI collapses that depth. The agent can produce specialist-quality output in a domain the operator barely knows, as long as the operator can direct and verify. The durable advantage moves from depth of skill to range of direction.

What Wins Now

The operators who are pulling ahead in 2025 share a profile:

• Four to six skills at solid-intermediate level
• Deep enough in one to verify AI output
• Strong taste in what to build, not just how
• Comfortable switching domains mid-day

That's the skill soup. No single ingredient is world-class. The combination is rare and valuable.

The Uncomfortable Part

This is uncomfortable for people who spent a decade specializing. The years weren't wasted; they built the taste that lets you direct agents well. But the leverage now comes from combining that depth with adjacent competencies. Learn an adjacent thing. Then another. Cook the soup.