The book
When the Old Path Disappears
The book-length case for protecting development in an age that rewards performance.
The old path assumed that performing something and becoming capable at it were the same climb. Do the hard work, and the work changes you. AI severs that. It lets a person produce at a level they have not grown into, and it does so inside every system we built to develop people: the classroom, the first job, the apprenticeship, the family.
When the Old Path Disappears is about what that severance costs and what it asks of us. It argues that the task is not to refuse the tool but to see development directly again, to protect the reps that build a capable adult, and to rebuild on purpose the conditions that judgment used to form by accident.
The book sits alongside the ideas gathered here: the performance-development gap, earned competence, and the six families of judgment.