I was sitting in an AI users group meeting at work recently. We went around the room and people described what they had been using the tools for. It wasn’t a technical crowd. These were people with domain knowledge and good instincts who had previously been blocked by a specific kind of gap. The gap between knowing what they needed and being able to build it themselves.

One person had used Claude to draft an email that communicated something complicated clearly and concisely. They knew what they wanted to say. Getting it onto the page in a way that landed the way they intended had always been the hard part.

One person had used it to sort through weeks of emails and messages and figure out what mattered most, what needed attention first, what could wait.

One person had used it to access data and build something, a small tool, a simple site, that let them pursue a question they’d had for a long time but couldn’t act on alone.

I kept thinking about my son.

Not because those people reminded me of him in some general way. But because each problem they described mapped almost exactly onto something he struggles with specifically. Writing and communication. Sequencing and organization and memory. Connecting an idea to a design to an implementation across multiple steps. I was sitting in a room full of people describing solutions to problems my son has every day.

He already knows the tools work. He made a song using AI. He had the idea, the feeling he was going after, the sound he wanted to make. AI handled the part where you have to translate a thing in your head into something that exists in the world. The song is on Spotify. It’s his. He made it.

The reason the song worked is specific. The way you verify a song is by listening to it. Does it sound like what you imagined? Does it feel right? That kind of judgment, aesthetic, sensory, instinctive, is something he has. The execution was what AI handled. The evaluation was something he could do himself.

That’s where the mismatch is for other kinds of tasks. Verifying code means holding an intention and comparing it to an output across multiple steps. That’s an executive function task, a sequencing task, a memory task. Not because any bar is higher in some general sense, but because the method of verification requires a specific cognitive skill that his brain makes harder. The tools don’t yet compensate for that gap.

That’s a statement about where AI is right now. Not about him.

What I find myself thinking about is what else might have a verification method that matches what he can do. The song worked because he could hear it. What else could he build that he could evaluate with his own judgment, his own senses, without needing a cognitive process that’s harder for him?

I don’t know yet. The tools are getting better. There will be more things he can build and evaluate and own.

He already proved that. The song is still on Spotify.