Nicolas Cole says the gap between beginners and experts using AI isn't understanding the tools. It's breaking a goal like "write a book" into concrete substeps, documenting them, and turning them into reusable skills that AI can execute. Experts unbundle tasks. Beginners don't.
I feel very strongly that the more valuable thing is being able to look at a task and break the task apart. That's ultimately what we are achieving here. A beginner would go, "I wanna write a book." Someone intermediate would go, "I wanna write a book and I wanna get it ready to publish on Amazon." An expert unbundles those and goes, "I wanna write a book, and in order to write a book, I have to go through the following substeps. And then in order to publish it on Amazon, it's not just one, it's actually a series of substeps." And so I am going to take the time to reverse engineer each one of those substeps and create documentation for it and then export all of it as a skill and then talk to Cowork and instruct Cowork on how to do that inside of Notion. And so the takeaway is that it's actually not AI knowledge. Yes, there are some new things here where you're like, oh cool, I didn't know AI could do that. But the real bottleneck is not actually knowing what AI can do or knowing how it works inside of AI. The real bottleneck is looking at a task and going, wait a second, what are all the substeps of this task? Unbundling it. This is like the hardest idea for people to understand is that the bottleneck to doing this has nothing to do with AI. It has everything to do with understanding what actually goes into that task.
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