So I’ve been thinking about hockey lately.
In particular, I’ve been thinking about Wayne Gretzky’s “Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” quote.
We’ve all heard it before. Some of us added it to our LinkedIn headers. Maybe it’s in your pitch deck. Entire companies have been built around predicting the next location of that metaphorical puck. (View Highlight)
That Gretzky quote made way more sense in 2010.
Back then, pucks were predictable. They moved like pucks are supposed to move: in straight lines, affected by physics, obeying the laws of hockey.
2010: Mobile is going to be big
2011: Mobile was big
2012: Mobile was still big
2013: Yep, still mobile
2014: Mobile, but bigger screens now
2015: Same mobile, better cameras
You could build a mobile-first startup in 2010 and still be basically right in 2015. The puck was just… sliding across the ice. Like a normal puck. You could do the math. (View Highlight)
Now, every morning, I wake up and check what changed in AI overnight:
Monday: “We need RAG systems!”
Tuesday: “Actually, long context windows make RAG obsolete!”
Wednesday: “Just kidding, we need RAG but different!”
Thursday: “Forget everything, we’re all agents now!”
Friday:(muffled screaming into coffee mug) (View Highlight)
We’ve got these incredible AI coding agents now, right? They can write entire applications in seconds. They can debug faster than we can read. They can refactor code while we’re still trying to remember what a factory pattern is.
And what are we building with them?
The same. exact. things. we’ve been building for twenty years.
Another SaaS app. Another CRUD dashboard. It’s like we invented teleportation and we’re using it to go to the same grocery store, just… faster.
I don’t know what we should be building instead. But if the tools are this different, shouldn’t the things we make be different too? (View Highlight)
Anyway, yeah, like I said earlier, Gretzky could already skate. He was incredibly agile. He could stop on a dime. Change direction mid-stride. His edges were so good he could literally dance on ice.
He didn’t become great because he predicted the puck. He became great because he could actually get to ANY position on the ice and be open. The prediction was secondary to the skating.
That’s where we are now. Except our skates are prompts. Our ice is context windows. Our edges are knowing how to talk to Claude or Gemini or whatever comes out next that makes both of them obsolete. (View Highlight)
Like, the other day I was thinking about how hard it was to build a mental model of the apps you’re building these days. Things change so fast and mutate so quickly now that you don’t have time to fully internalize how things work. Chad Fowler talked about it on The Ruby AI Podcast last week: your brain used to be able to relax while you did the boring parts like typing. I think that’s also when we used to process and build our theories of our programs. (View Highlight)
So yeah… instead of skating to where the puck might be in a year…
What if we just got really good at skating?
Like, what if we got so good at skating that when the puck shows up (wherever it shows up) we could just… go get it?
What if adaptability is the product? (View Highlight)
If your company isn’t giving you the tools to learn to skate like Claude Code or Amp subscriptions, API credits, time to experiment with AI coding, and so on, you’re not actually employed. You’re in hospice. They’re just keeping you comfortable while you become obsolete. (View Highlight)
You won’t be replaced by AI. That’s the wrong fear. You’ll be replaced by someone who learned to skate when you were still arguing about whether the ice is real.
It’s important to find a company that gets it. That throws money at making you faster. That understands we’re not playing hockey anymore (we’re playing something new, where the rules change mid-game and the only constant is acceleration). (View Highlight)
Or don’t. Stand there in your street shoes, explaining to everyone how you’ve been coding for twenty years and these kids with their AI tools don’t understand real programming.
The puck doesn’t care about your experience. It’s already zipped by you while you were reading this sentence. (View Highlight)
