AI isn't a tool anymore. It's a collaborator.
And the people who can't guide other humans won't be able to guide it either.
Four years of working with AI has shifted something for me. Especially the last six months.
Early on, AI was a tool. You gave it a command, it did a thing. Summarize this. Rewrite that. Clean up the formatting. Useful, but basic.
That’s not where we are anymore.
What it can actually do now
I had Claude (the latest model) analyze my website and a lead magnet page recently. It didn’t just check grammar or spot typos. It flagged things that were off-brand in ways I’d have to work hard to explain to a new employee.
Some of what it caught:
Tiny copy issues most humans would miss — a stray space before an em dash, a lowercase “l” that was actually the number “1”
Bigger strategic issues about positioning and tone
Subtle places where the writing drifted from how I actually sound
Was it perfect? No. A few suggestions didn’t match my sensibility. But when I told it I’d made a change, it registered that and updated its own notes. Next time, it remembered.
The employee analogy
Think of AI as a capable new hire. Smart, fast, can spot things you’d never notice. But still a new hire.
A new hire needs guidance. They need to know how you think, what you care about, why something matters. They need dialogue — not just commands.
AI works the same way.
Who’s going to struggle with this
My hunch, based on watching people try to adopt AI over the past few years: some people have never been good at giving guidance. They’re trapped in their own perspective. They can’t imagine how someone else thinks. Delegating to a human employee has always been hard for them, and their employees usually don’t last long.
I suspect those same people are going to struggle with AI. Because AI now demands the same skills:
Explaining what you want clearly
Giving examples, not just rules
Correcting it when it’s off, instead of giving up
Being patient enough to have a real back-and-forth
If your style is to bark vague orders and expect perfect results, AI will probably disappoint you. Same as humans do.
What this means for lawyers
Solo and small-firm lawyers have an advantage here. You’re already used to doing everything yourself, which means you know your own standards. You know what “good” looks like.
The question is whether you can put that into words. Whether you can guide.
That’s the skill that matters now. Not prompt engineering. Not picking the right tool. Just the basic human skill of explaining clearly what you want and why.
;-)
Ernie
P.S. In the Inner Circle, we practice this together every week in the AI Lab — working through real tasks, refining how we talk to AI, building the skill of guiding it.
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https://innercircle.ernietheattorney.net/