I know Kung Fu…

I genuinely think there is something awesome about the first time AI does something you didn’t think was possible. I don’t mean like “oh that’s clever”, I mean that is most-excellently - AWESOME. Like so good you want to tell someone. Immediately. You’re not entirely sure what just happened but you know it was totally unreasonable…

We may have all experienced a small taste of this feeling before... A couple of years ago we renovated a cottage in Cornwall. I could do a little carpentry. My plumbing was, “aspirational” - at best. By the end of that project I’d plumbed in a toilet, a sink, two showers, cut and laid slate over underfloor heating across three ground floor rooms, and tiled a wet room. And I even grew to enjoy decorating (IKR!).

I learned almost all of it from YouTube and Instagram.

That was the first “I know kung fu.“ Watching a stranger do something complicated, thinking, right, I can probably do that, going to Screwfix, and discovering (often with genuine surprise) that I actually could.

My dad, who turned 90 last week, just does stuff. He doesn’t watch the video. He doesn’t need the tutorial. He just gets on with it, always has, still does! I’ve never quite worked out where the knowledge came from, but I think what he actually passed on wasn’t any particular skill. It was the approach. Look at the problem. Assume you can work it out. Get on with it.

Our eldest is in New Zealand, working at a bar in a hotel. They asked him if he could build them a website. (He’s not a developer - he’s a charmer wanting a side-gig). The time difference between London and New Zealand makes it difficult to collaborate in any normal way, so rather than trying to walk him through it over video calls, I did something slightly unusual.

I used AI to build him a training course. Not on how to build websites. On how to approach the problem. Research the competition. Understand the local market. Work out what makes this particular hotel different. Then - and only then - start building.

He worked through it while I was asleep - went for a surf and the next day, he had a fully functioning website.

Three generations. My dad just knows. I learned from YouTube. My son learned from AI. The tools are completely different. The underlying principle is identical: understand what you’re looking at before you start swinging. Which is what makes the mega-prompt economy on LinkedIn so fascinating to me. You know the posts. Thousands of likes. “Copy and paste this prompt and watch the magic happen.“ And some of them genuinely are useful - but almost all of them work the same way:

“You are an expert in “Ju-Jitsu” - and then skip straight to “now go fight and beat the agents and become the One...” It doesn’t work that way - not even in the Matrix.

It’s the download without the understanding. Neo in the chair, eyes wide open, ready to take on the world. Then Morpheus walks into the dojo and kicks his ass.

As I’ve said, I’ve been Neo in that chair more than once.

Which is what I accidentally taught my son, and what my dad taught me without ever putting it into words.

The prompts are fine. The tools are extraordinary. But the thing that makes Neo become The One isn’t what they downloaded into his head. It’s what he figured out afterwards.

Thanks Dad.