Seven postures facing AI: the Renaissance.
You recognise them by a single phrase: “look what I can do now.” It’s said by an entrepreneur who wrote code twenty years ago and had to stop to run the company. By a CTO who left the keyboard for meetings. By a product manager who started in engineering and ended up in slide decks. Different people. Same posture.
I’m one of them. For half my life I loved building software with my own hands. Then I had to stop: running a company means giving up the code to do what’s needed. For ten years I lived with the quiet peace of someone who has given up something they love.
With AI, I came back. Not like starting from scratch. Like returning to an old love that welcomes you home. Collapsing the gap between idea and execution is a feeling I’d never had before. It’s the triumph of experience: years of craft behind you, and finally a tool to make what’s in your head real.
I see it in the other Renaissance Types I meet. The same drive. The same light. And the same next step, a few months in: how do I get others to do what I’ve started doing?
They start passing prompts to the developers they work with. Explain the approach. Show the output. When others try it alone, some get as excited as they did. Others don’t. Some get similar results. Others don’t. And they think: something’s missing.
What’s missing is the Renaissance Type. That is — what they can’t see in themselves: twenty years of craft, instinct, mistakes already paid for. In their hands, AI is a lever because there’s an arm holding it. In other hands, the lever is there. The arm is missing.
The blind spot isn’t a lack of method. It’s believing you have one. What the Renaissance Type calls method is an intuition stitched together from their own experience. Nothing transferable. And until they realise that, they think the problem is everyone else.
The Renaissance Type doesn’t scale production across the company. The company produces more only through them.