Most of our time was spent maintaining an elaborate, fragile state that was required for work to happen

March 27, 2026

I think AI is revealing that a vast percentage of knowledge work is scaffolding overhead. Maybe 75-99%.

1. In my own field of cybersecurity, 99% of security testing (aka "hacking") isn't thinking about new vulnerabilities, it's stitching up context on the target(s), creating and maintaining tooling, and building and maintaining workflows that allow you to produce quality, consistent tests at scale. Tons of maintenance and support to build this stuff. And it's a massive filter for who can and cannot do the work.
2. Another task I've spent my career doing, developers spend a massive amount (most?) of our time on the stuff around coding, not actually coding itself. We have to build infrastructure, we have to maintain tooling, libraries, we have to stitch up authentication, we have to build and manage databases, etc. And it's all very brittle and constantly changing.
3. You'd think High-end Consulting would be lots of thinking, right? Lots of signal vs. scaffolding. It's not. Just like hacking and programming, it's mostly the maintenance of templates, best practices, and your own knowledge base of previous work. McKinsey isn't starting from scratch when they do engagements. They do interviews, hear the same old problems that differ slightly from the other 29,346 times they've solved this problem, and they apply their templates and insert the 2-12% (making up a number) of sauce that was unique to the situation.

In other words, it's stuff that can be captured, explained, and written down. Including the expert knowledge, actually, because even that is just facts/knowledge plus lessons learned over time.

Well, guess what AI absolutely crushes?

That. Exact. Thing.

What Agent Skills have shown us is that you can package a massive amount of this stuff into background, context, methodologies, tooling, and knowledge bases. And you can give an AI a task using this skill and it will execute as good or better than most people who do that work professionally.

This is the truth underneath the markets being hit so hard by Anthropic's release of certain skills, like legal workflows.

The work wasn't hard. What was hard was maintaining all this scaffolding. The workflows. The knowledge bases. And the output formats that make everything look professional.

This is the part that's become trivial due to AI.

This doesn't mean all humans are screwed. Or that no real work was being done. It was. And some of that work was actually difficult, even for AIs today.

But it was a tiny percentage, being done by a tiny percentage of the best people, a tiny percentage of the time. The rest was scaffolding, and that's all becoming commoditized pee in the pool.

Craziest part is it's just barely starting.