Tweeted in January: schooling is overrated, reading is non negotiable.
Six weeks later, AI has made writing nearly free. A serviceable blog post is one prompt away. A serviceable LinkedIn comment is two prompts. The feed has never had more text and has never been less worth reading.
The thing nobody noticed: reading didn't get any cheaper.
Reading carefully takes the same hours it always did. Noticing that an argument doesn't hold takes the same attention. Forming a position you'd defend to a hostile audience takes the same willingness to be wrong in public. AI doesn't help with any of that. It can summarise. It cannot tell you what to think. It can produce ten arguments. It cannot tell you which one is true.
So the value moved. A year ago competent writing was a job. Today it's a commodity. What isn't a commodity: noticing the load-bearing claim in a long document. Noticing the load-bearing claim that's missing. Being willing to write three sentences that contradict your industry. Knowing which of those three is the one to actually publish.
That's reading. Reading carefully, not consuming feed.
The colleagues who are most useful now are not the ones who write the most. They're the ones who read a draft and tell you what's wrong with it in one sentence. They've always existed. They are now the difference between a team that ships true things and a team that ships fluent things.
The same shift hits founders. The ones who win in the next two years are the ones who can read their market. Actual customers' words. Competitors' product copy. The regulation everyone is selling against. The skill is noticing what isn't being said. That skill doesn't come from a model. It comes from reading slowly, with a pen, with scepticism, on purpose.
Read more than you write. Read fewer, slower, harder things. Argue with what you read in the margins. Then write the one sentence you'd defend.
AI is a writing accelerator for people who already have something to say. For people who don't, it's a way to fill the world with text nobody benefits from reading. Don't be that. Read first.
— Simon