What Skills Are Rising in Value in the AI Era?
Josh Woodward looks for mispriced signals in the people around him, past the usual talk of taste, judgment, and vibe coding. One is an unlearning rate: how fast someone can learn a thing and then walk away from it when a product test shows the old approach is done. Another is explosive endurance, a phrase he took from a book about Roger Federer. It means people who can go very hard and still pace themselves, and the people around them, over a long stretch. Labs talks about that pace as seasons.
Collaboration is rising at the same time, even as more of the work becomes directing agents. Someone still has to work with people. The signal he watches is how fast a person can build trust, with an agent or a swarm of agents and with other people, and create the chemistry for that collaboration. As the cost of making products falls, more products get made and people team up with different people more often, so building trust matters more, not less.
