Deep in one, literate in many

The practical model is a deep specialism paired with working literacy across adjacent disciplines. Specialism sets the quality ceiling. Literacy is what lets someone direct tooling instead of being replaced by it, and it is why interdisciplinary teams are outperforming narrow ones on the same brief.

What the tools do not replace

Agents are extraordinary at producing options and mediocre at deciding between them. They generate ten directions in the time it used to take to sketch one, which means the scarce skill is no longer production, it is taste, judgment, and the confidence to kill nine good things in service of one right thing. That is a specialist’s instinct applied at a generalist’s speed.

For studios, the implication is practical. Teams get smaller and more senior. The junior work that once justified large rosters, resizing, versioning, first-draft production, is increasingly handled by tools under supervision. What remains is the work that requires a point of view, and a point of view cannot be prompted into existence. It is earned across years of shipped decisions.

So the honest advice is neither “learn one thing forever” nor “learn everything shallowly.” Go deep enough in a craft to have standards, then use agentic tools to reach past the edges of that craft without waiting for a hand-off. The people who thrive will be unmistakably good at something and dangerously capable at the adjacent things.