During his Re:Invent keynote, Werner Vogels shared a principle that has stuck with me: “The work is yours, not that of the tools.” At the time, it resonated as a statement about engineering ownership. But the more I sit with it, the more I think it applies to everything.

Living in our current times of unprecedented change, knowledge work is being massively transformed. Skills like coding, writing, and math once required a high level of friction and time to generate. However, producing code, essays, and solving math questions is as simple as hitting the Submit using your favourite AI tool. When looking at the surface level, it seems like those skills are losing value. But I think misses the point entirely.

In his newsletter this week, Sahil Bloom wrote about The Doorman Fallacy (very coincidental because throughout this week I was meaning to write about this topic, but was struggling with how to articulate it until I read this in my inbox). This is the tendency to undervalue something by focusing only on its most visible function. When we reduce a skill or role to its most obvious output, we miss everything underneath.

The Doorman Fallacy got me to reflect on my personal and work life.

Mornings are my favourite time of day. I wake up around 6am, and during university I developed a habit of filling silence with a YouTube video playing in the background while getting ready or eating breakfast. Everything felt rushed, always needing instant gratification. This year, I’ve been trying something different. I make coffee, cook breakfast, eat, and clean up in silence or read on my Kindle. So far, I’ve felt more energized and less anxious before heading into work. If I just focused on the obvious output, there’s no doubt in my mind that the craving of instant gratification would resurface. Taking deep breaths, and reminding myself to go slow and enjoy my mornings are times that give me so much peace.

The same lens applies to my work. Using Claude Code and Windsurf, most of my time isn’t spent writing code anymore. It’s spent defining what specifically to build, deploying across environments, testing, and iterating on UX based on feedback. The execution is the easy part. The hard part is making something that other people and agents will actually use, especially when the job is automating processes in a cloud environment (so many factors like security, reliability, cost, etc. to think about). The surface value of a developer is the code; the real value is the judgment, ownership, and iteration.

“You build it, you own it” - Werner Vogels

Lastly, I’d like to focus on this part of what Werner said. All the PRs I merge, Jira tickets I tackle, they are assigned to me. If something breaks, it comes back to me. Even if an AI agent wrote most of the code. Whether it’s a quiet morning or a product decision, real value is not what is most obvious, but what is underneath.

Interesting Ideas

• Doctor Mike Eats His Last Meal: Great interview with many meaningful topics covered: action before motivation, how should we raise children, outlook on the US medical system, healthy skepticism in science, impacts of social media on misinformation, importance of humility. My biggest takeaway from Doctor Mike is always trying to find balance for our health, and how we think about the world.
• AI Doesn’t Reduce Work — It Intensifies It: Interesting study from the HBR where the productivity increase from generation trickles into fatigue, burnout, and decline in quality due to context switching. The authors called for more intentional use of AI at work emphasizing the need for human collaboration, intentional pauses to prevent context switching.
• How My App Is Doing (2 Month Update): Chris Raroque is an indie developer who makes productivity apps (I use his budgeting app Luna). In this video he was summarizing his takeaways from releasing his new app Amy. Despite building multiple apps and leveraging the latest AI tooling, Chris finds himself having to iterate on many things: AI costs, user retention, new features, etc. It’s refreshing to hear from a real world developer who is encountering nuanced problems that are impossible to encounter before development. Any product always requires constant iteration and refinement and I love videos like these.