The Gap
We are preparing kids for a version of work that no longer exists.
About a year ago, my son decided he wanted an interactive program to study 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. Then he built 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 wasn't knowledge he already had. It was access to the tools. He described what he wanted. The tools kept up. His mind led, and the tools followed. He did not have to know how before he started.
What he was doing has a name. In the tech world, people have started calling it “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. 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 that only 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 college 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 college savings plan 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, at least with what is being taught now. That is why something needs 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 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 AI systems could perform.
The share of work actually being done with these tools today, based on how people are using one of the most widely used AI tools.
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 to pay attention to. 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 the type of work being replaced. The roles being absorbed first are the entry points into 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 those careers that is being absorbed. The junior associate reviewing contracts. The first-year analyst building decks. The new developer writing repetitive, standard code. 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 already visible in the data and in how companies are restructuring.
Work that gets better with the tools
The tools multiply what a skilled person can do. Judgment is the product. The tools make it sharper.
Work that depends on showing up in person
Presence, trust, and physical skill. Technology helps at the edges. The core stays with the person.
Work that is being absorbed into the tools
Not disappearing, but compressing. Ten roles may become three. The skills transfer. The titles shift.
The first column, work that gets better with the tools, runs counter to the instinct most of us have, which is to keep technology at arm's length. Here, leaning in is what makes the career grow.
The second, work that depends on showing up in person, is the category most of us have not thought much about: electricians, nurse practitioners, HVAC technicians, welders. Demand is rising for reasons that have nothing to do with software. Demographics, electrification, reshoring of manufacturing, and decades of underinvestment in infrastructure are driving it.
The third, work that is being absorbed into the tools, is where we have pointed entry-level talent for the last decade. These were safe, reasonable careers as recently as 2021, held by people who trained seriously and whose experience is still valuable. The work is changing shape, and the skills transfer. This is a transition, not a verdict on anyone doing the work.
Every absorbed role has an evolved version of it.
ATMs absorbed cash-handling, and the teller evolved into a relationship banker. Spreadsheets absorbed manual calculation, and the bookkeeper evolved into the advisor. In each case the routine work moved into the tool, and the judgment work moved up. The problem is not that paths disappear. It is that we wait too long to adjust.
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.
And if you are in one of those roles today, the move is not to change careers. It is to pick up the tools. Most people get comfortable in a few weeks of real use. The person in a role who uses the tools well becomes more valuable, not less. Adaptability is the skill that builds across every column.
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 these tools are genuinely exciting to use.
VIBE Afterschool
One afternoon a week, a small group of teenagers works alongside professionals who use these tools in their actual jobs, then uses those same tools to build something real. The session is just the starting point. What begins there carries into the rest of their time, as they keep building, refining, and following their own ideas. It is not a class or a curriculum, just proximity to the work and the room to try.
The idea is simple and open. Any school, teacher, or community group can run something like this. The ingredients already exist in most places: 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. If any of that resonates, vibeafterschool.com has more on how to get something like this started.
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 one of these tools, and use it for something real. Comfort comes from using it daily, not from reading about it.
Let them build something.
A teenager can describe what they want in plain language and have a working prototype by the end of the 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: that a direction picked at nineteen will hold for the next forty years. That assumption has been breaking down quietly for a while. The tools are just speeding it up.
What is emerging looks a lot like how careers worked before college became the default. You learn by doing. You build a portfolio over time. Your reputation compounds. The tools get sharper each year.
That used to be the life of a few trades. It is now open to most of our kids, and the tools are better than they have ever been. The sooner our kids treat them as ordinary, just part of how the work gets done, the better prepared they will be.
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 piece reflects the personal views of the author.