Don't Delegate Understanding

Good leaders delegate constantly. Without delegation nothing can scale past 1 person. Trying to do everything yourself is its own failure, a trap I have fallen into countless times over the years.

There is however a difference between handing off the 'doing' and handing off understanding. If you hand off understanding you have no way of evaluating the work, correcting it, or defending it. You are taking the quality of those outputs on faith alone.

AI removed the cost of delegating. What used to require hiring someone is now free and instant. So people delegate tasks to a model without parameters, context, or a definition of what good looks like, and accept whatever comes back. The output reads well, which is exactly the problem. A confident, fluent answer that is wrong in a way only someone who understands the work would catch.

That is the line. Hand off the work but always keep the understanding. Without understanding you can't tell good work from work that merely looks good.