Revenge of The Generalists

Revenge of The Generalists

Something's shifting in the tech world, and it runs deeper than the usual platform wars or programming language debates. I've been a generalist for most of my career – connecting dots, seeing the bigger picture – and for years, that often felt like playing second fiddle to the hyper-specialists. Deep expertise was the undisputed king. But lately, especially with the rapid rise of AI, I feel like the very value of specialization itself is being renegotiated. The ground is definitely moving.

What's emerging as the critical differentiator isn't just technical skill or years logged in a narrow field. It's something more fundamental: agency. It’s that willingness to act, to build, to push forward without waiting for instructions or validation or permission. It’s the messy, often defiant, sometimes irrational drive to simply make things happen. Contrast that with the credential-driven path many of us were taught was the only way to succeed.

This isn't happening in a vacuum. AI is the catalyst, the great enabler. These new tools are dramatically lowering the barrier to entry for complex tasks that once required years of dedicated study. I think back to just a year ago – it took me nine months just to develop a decent working application, learning to code and design. Today? Leveraging AI, I'm confident that I could build something more sophisticated, ready for users, in a couple of weeks. That’s the kind of amplification we're talking about. It turns intent into reality at an unprecedented speed.

And this shift is reshaping the very structure of business. We're seeing the early days of what Sam Altman predicted back in 2023: the potential for a "1-person billion-dollar company." While we might not be there yet, the trend is undeniable. Startups are emerging that generate staggering revenue ($100s of millions) with incredibly small teams – sometimes lacking traditional sales, marketing, or HR departments entirely. Think of companies like Midjourney, reportedly pulling in over $500M annually with maybe 40 employees, or the companies Y-Combinator tracks averaging $2.8M revenue per employee. These aren't just anomalies; they're prototypes of a future built by high-agency individuals leveraging AI to multiply their impact.

Now, it's important to distinguish this human agency from the "AI agents" many of us in tech are building. I'm spending time and money developing systems designed to autonomously perform tasks – interpret data, adjust strategies, provide detailed recommendations. But these tools are designed for capability and predictability. They execute complex instructions brilliantly, but they lack real independence or that spark of initiative. Customers want tools that listen. High-agency people often don't. That spark is the key difference.

Of course, deep expertise hasn't vanished overnight. For decades, specialization was the optimal strategy. It took time to master disciplines, creating a natural moat. Credentials signaled that investment. The world wasn't always kind to generalists who knew a bit about everything but weren't the definitive expert in one thing. The so-called "Jack of All Trades".

Even now, the impact isn't uniform. I think we'll see a split. In fields where errors have severe consequences – think healthcare, defense, critical infrastructure, core AI safety research – the demand for specialized human oversight and accountability will remain high. We need experts when the stakes are life and death.

But in many other domains – marketing, data science, design, education, finance, architecture, software development for many applications – where "trying again" after an AI fumble is acceptable, disruption is happening fast. Non-specialists, armed with powerful AI and high agency, are jumping lanes, building tools, and launching ventures that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. The focus shifts from implementation details to architectural vision, from how to what and why. That's fertile ground for generalists.

This transition won't be without pain. But no pain, no gain. Established hierarchies, particularly middle management layers built on team size as a proxy for importance, will resist. And our educational institutions face a monumental task: how do you pivot from a system primarily designed to mint specialists with credentials, when AI and agency are reshaping the very nature of expertise and value creation? Adaptation will be slow and likely forced by the market itself.

There are risks, too. Ultra-lean operations lack redundancy. A single point of failure, whether human or AI, can cause cascading problems. Chaos is a potential byproduct of shedding structure.

But the opportunity is immense. The core takeaway for me? Agency isn't fixed; it's a mindset. It’s about recognizing and shedding the artificial constraints we've internalized about what's possible based on our background or formal training.

The tools are here to build amazing things with fewer traditional resources than ever before. The map is being redrawn in real-time. The question is less about having all the answers, and more about having the agency to pursue them.