The Gap
We are preparing kids for a version of work that no longer exists.
About a year ago, my son wanted to see if he could build an interactive program for studying test questions, so he built one. A few weeks later, when his younger sister was struggling with her times tables, he built her a game with rewards between questions to keep her going. After that came an app for his trading card collection that uses a phone camera to grade a card's condition and estimate what it might be worth.
He is a middle schooler with no programming background. What made this possible was not in him. It was in the tools. He described what he wanted. The tools kept up. His mind led. The tools followed. He did not have to know how before he started.
What he was doing has a name. The tech industry coined the term vibe coding. You describe what you want to build in plain language and work with an AI until it exists. The skill is not in the syntax. It is in knowing what to ask for, when to push back, and when something is good enough to ship. It is closer to directing than to typing.
What it rewards is not superior intelligence. It is imagination, curiosity, and the drive to keep going until the thing in your head exists in the world. Those are not gifts a few kids are born with. They are habits any kid can build when they are given something real to make.
None of this required special talent or training. Just access and the freedom to explore. How many kids could be doing the same thing right now if someone showed them where to start?
My son has always wanted to go to an Ivy League school to become a lawyer. My daughter wants to be a nurse. Her path is clear: medicine still needs the degree, the clinical hours, the credential. But my son's path? I am less sure every month. The legal profession is one of the fields most visibly being reshaped by these tools.
We have been contributing to a 529, the college savings account, since both kids were born. It used to feel like the surest investment we could make. Now I find myself questioning where that money should go and what we are actually preparing them for.
I am not sure I want to send my son to college anymore. It is uncomfortable to say. It is also honest. Not with what is being taught now. That is why we need things to change.
The tools that have arrived in the last few years are reshaping what careers look like, faster than schools or families are adjusting. Some roles are being absorbed into the tools. More are being amplified by them. The ones worth paying attention to are the ones where human judgment, care, and craft get sharper when paired with the tools, not replaced by them.
One chart makes this concrete. Anthropic published it recently, two shapes overlaid that show where things stand right now.
What the shapes show.
The share of job tasks in each category that current models could perform.
The share of work actually being done with these tools today, based on real traffic on one of the most widely used AI systems.
Figure reproduced from Anthropic’s published research. Used with attribution.
The blue shape reaches into almost every profession. The red is a small, uneven bloom concentrated in a handful of fields. The distance between them is the story. That gap is where careers will be made or missed over the next decade.
What the tools can do is far beyond what anyone is actually using them for, and what they are already doing is growing every month.
Global tech layoffs by year
Layoffs are not new. What is new is what work is being replaced. The roles that change first are the first rung of the careers we have always pointed our kids toward. Lawyer, marketer, accountant, software developer. The careers are still there. It is the on-ramp into them that is being absorbed. The junior associate reviewing contracts. The first-year analyst building decks. The new developer writing boilerplate. That is the work AI does well today, and it is also the work that taught the next generation how to do the job.
That is not a reason to panic. It is a reason to start preparing them differently. The careers are still real. The path in has changed.
The good news is that the same tools changing the landscape are available to anyone willing to learn them. Including our kids.
What we are preparing them for
Most careers are moving in one of three directions right now. Work that gets better with the tools. Work that depends on showing up in person. Work that is being absorbed into the tools. These are not predictions. They are patterns visible in the data and in how companies are already restructuring.
Compounding with the tools
The tools multiply what a skilled person can do. Judgment is the product. The tools make it sharper.
Anchored in humans
Work that depends on presence, trust, or physical skill. Technology helps at the edges. The core stays with the person.
Being absorbed
Not disappearing, but compressing. Ten roles may become three. The skills transfer. The titles shift.
The first column leans into the tools, which is the opposite of the instinct most people have. The second column is the one almost everyone overlooks: electricians, nurse practitioners, HVAC technicians, welders. Demand for these roles is rising for reasons that have nothing to do with software. Demographics, electrification, reshoring, and decades of underinvestment in infrastructure are driving it.
Column three is where we have been sending entry-level talent for the last decade. It is not a list of failures. These are careers that were safe and reasonable as recently as 2021, held by people who trained seriously and are still needed. The work is changing shape, and the skills transfer. This is a transition, not a verdict.
Every absorbed job has a better cousin.
The problem is not that paths disappear. It is that we wait too long to redirect.
If your child is training for one of those roles, the skills almost always transfer to something nearby. The transition is easier the earlier you start looking.
So what do we do about it?
If the gap is exposure, the solution is not more curriculum. It is proximity. Put kids in a room with people already doing the work, give them the same tools, and let them build. The opportunity is in middle and high schools right now, where teenagers are still open to everything and where these tools are genuinely exciting to use.
VIBE Afterschool
One afternoon a week, a small group of students in grades 7 through 12 works alongside professionals who use these tools in their actual jobs, then uses those same tools to build something real. Not a class. Not a curriculum. Just proximity to the work and the room to try.
Free, open-source, and available to any school that wants to try it. The first pilots begin this fall. The ingredients already exist in almost every community: a teacher willing to give an afternoon a week, a few professionals willing to show up, and students who deserve a better starting point than the one we are currently giving them. Learn more at vibeafterschool.com.
What families can do right now
Families do not have to wait for schools to catch up. Here are four things worth doing right now.
Put the tools in their hands.
Sit down with them, open a model, and use it for something real. Fluency comes from daily use, not from reading about it.
Let them build something.
A teenager can describe what they want in plain language and ship a working website in an afternoon. The skill is not syntax. It is knowing what to ask for and when to push back. Give them the room to try.
Take the trades seriously.
The best electrician or HVAC technician in 2035 may well earn more than many lawyers do today. Electrification, reshoring, and infrastructure are extending a trend that has been quietly strong for a decade.
Arrange a day of shadowing.
Most practitioners say yes when asked respectfully. One afternoon in a real lab, shop, or clinic clarifies a direction that months of research cannot.
Where this leaves us.
This is not the end of work. It is the end of one assumption about it: that a direction picked at nineteen will hold for the next forty years. That assumption has been quietly breaking down for a while. The tools are not causing it so much as speeding it up.
What is emerging is, in some ways, older than it sounds. A life built through small apprenticeships. A portfolio that grows slowly. A reputation that compounds. Tools that sharpen every year.
That kind of life used to be reserved for artisans and physicians. It is now within reach of many more of our children, with better instruments than have ever existed. The sooner they can treat those instruments as ordinary, just part of how the work gets done, the better prepared they will be for whatever comes next.
We are not waiting on the future. We are deciding whether our kids meet it early or late.
Dustin Rauch
Dustin is the CEO of Juno Maps and the father of two school-age kids. He has spent the last decade building software for the people who actually run things, watching the tools quietly change what one person can do.
This essay reflects the personal views of the author.