Afterwords

This book was written between late 2025 and 2026, in a moment when the technology was changing fast enough that some of the moves in Part II will probably look quaint by 2028. That is the cost of writing about a thing while it is happening. The book is a snapshot, not a final word.

A few things I do not know.

I do not know which of the moves in Part II will turn out to be the right ones. I tried to write moves that hold across the way the technology is moving, but the specifics will need updating. The next book on this subject, by someone else or by me, will look at this one and find some of it dated.

I do not know what AI in 2030 will be. Nobody does. The book has tried to write about the shape of the problem rather than the specifics of the tools, because the tools will change and the shape will not. That bet may not entirely hold.

I do not know whether the cultural rebuild from Chapter 9 will go in a direction any of us like. The professionals shaping the new norms are doing their best with the time they have. Some of what they decide will be wrong. Some of it will be wrong in ways that are slow to surface. We will all be a little surprised by it.

What I am more confident about: the people who choose to be honest about how they are using the technology, with themselves and with their teams, will be in a better position five years from now than the people who do not. The honest ones will be the ones running the renegotiation. They will have been thinking about it longest, in language they made themselves.

If this book gave you some of that language, it did what I wanted it to.

Shekhar Bhardwaj

Wilmington, Delaware