The Curse of Multi-Ability

I'll say this now and remind you again later. You can do anyone's job now. That's exactly why you shouldn't.

Everyone's having the same week. A designer opens Claude Code and ships working software. A developer opens Figma Make and builds the interface. The walls between jobs are coming down, and the mood is giddy: turns out you can do everyone's job now.

More people doing more things is a great thing. Until it isn't.

Because being able to do everyone's job isn't a superpower. It's a target.

Luke Wroblewski wrote the an optimistic take on newfound superpowers (read it here). His worry is dilution: chase every role AI opens up and you end up a passable version of all of them, what he calls Mediocre Man [love it], the guy who can play a developer on TV but not, in real life.

His advice is right. Don't spread yourself thin across six crafts you half-understand. Double down on the one thing you're uniquely wired for and use AI to make it reach further.

But Luke is worried about you doing this to yourself.

The bigger drain I see multiple times a day is the one other people do to you.

Because competence is a magnet. The better you are at something, the more that something gets routed to your desk. Not because it's the best use of you, but because you're the path of least resistance. You know how to do it, so it becomes your job to do it. Again. And again.

Let's call them energy vampires. Not the people who bum you out at parties, the ones who treat your ability as their convenience. They don't want to learn the skill. They're allergic to what you did to get here. Curiosity, YouTube exploration, Reddit thread scouring, building on the weekends. They don't want to learn the tool. They want to learn you.

You become the API they call instead of the thing they could have built themselves.

Electricians have a name for the cost. Phantom load is the power a device draws while it's sitting there looking switched off. The charger in the wall with nothing plugged into it. It's small, it's constant, and it's the reason the bill is higher than the sum of the things you actually used. Energy vampires are phantom load with a Slack account, a Teams account, a title higher than yours. Each ask is small. None of them is the one that breaks you. The drain is the sum of those asks that nobody really sees.

This is the curse of multi-ability. We tell generalists their range is freedom, go anywhere, do anything (I've made that case myself). In practice, unmanaged range is conscription. The more you can do, the more of everyone's everything ends up pointed at you. The specialist gets to say "not my area." The generalist never gets to, because everything is sort of their area.

Versatility doesn't widen your options. It narrows them to whatever's currently on fire.

AI was supposed to end this. If anyone can do the thing now, nobody needs to route it to you. That was the theory.

It's making it worse for two reasons.

First, your range expanded overnight and the things you can plausibly do tripled, which means the surface area people can offload onto you tripled too. You're a bigger magnet than you were a year ago.

Second, every ask got cheap. "Can't you just have AI do it?" is the new "got a sec?" When the marginal cost of a yes feels like zero, the yeses stop getting counted. You don't notice the boundary eroding, because each individual crossing is free. The tool that promised to set you free quietly turned you into the most efficient dumping ground in the building.

I got this wrong for years.

As modern generalists, we've all been the one who could so we did. I said yes to everything adjacent to my skill set because saying yes felt like being valuable. Being the guy who could do anything was the identity. It took me an embarrassingly long time to see that it wasn't value. It was a slow leak. I was in fact helping people; but I was also training a whole roster of them to route around their own learning and straight to me. They got a deliverable. They never got the skill. And I got a calendar full of other people's work and called it being a team player. And I got drained.

AI didn't fix that reflex in me. It armed it. Now the yeses feel free, so I have to fight the old habit harder than ever.

So here's the upgrade to the old line. "Just because you can doesn't mean you should" used to be about restraint. In the AI era it's about math, because the answer to "can I?" is now permanently yes. Can stopped being a useful question.

The useful one is: "am I the only one who can?" and if I take this, does the person asking ever learn it?

Run the next request through that filter before you reflexively say yes. If doing the thing makes you more of what you're uniquely wired for, take it. If it just makes you more available, the most generous move isn't handing over the output. It's handing over the tool and letting them struggle through it once. That's not selfish. It's the only version of help that doesn't have to be repeated forever.

Luke's right that AI doesn't mean you should go be everyone. I'd push it one step further. It doesn't even mean you should do everything you're now capable of. It means you finally have cover to protect the one thing only you can do, and make everyone else go learn the rest.

You can do anyone's job now. That's exactly why you shouldn't.