Lenny's PodcastMax Schoening: Why agency beats skills as AI flattens craft
Through Notion's prototyping playground, designers ship code in the terminal; the first 10% of every project is now free, exposing who has agency.
At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Why agency outlasts skills as AI reshapes product building
- AI makes the “first 10%” of projects nearly free, shifting advantage to people who can rapidly prototype, iterate, and choose good directions early.
- Schoening contends that agency—believing the world is malleable and acting to change it—is now the key differentiator as skill barriers drop via AI tools.
- Notion’s practice of designers and PMs prototyping in code is less about shipping to production and more about designing in the true medium of AI/agent loops and interactive systems.
- As roles blur, teams risk losing specialists and craft; scaling reliable, high-quality software remains a distinct and under-discussed engineering discipline.
- The SaaS “apocalypse” is overstated: users still pay for maintenance and specialist focus, while AI pushes tools toward more general, customizable “90s-style” software experiences.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasOptimize for agency, not credentials or role purity.
When models put skills “at your fingertips,” the bottleneck becomes whether you take initiative, reshape your job, and push ideas into reality rather than hiding behind “skill issues.”
Have designers/PMs think in code to master the material.
Schoening cares less about non-engineers deploying production code and more about them prototyping in the medium that will ship—especially for AI products where interaction dynamics (agent loops) can’t be captured in static mockups.
Use a “safe playground” to make code one-shottable for newcomers.
Notion created an LLM-friendly prototyping codebase to remove fear of the terminal and lower activation energy; once people are “on the treadmill,” improving models let them gradually contribute closer to production.
Don’t confuse more output (features/tokens/LOC) with better outcomes.
He warns against “vibe coding” as a quality trap and rejects token-spend bragging as analogous to boasting about lines of code; reliability and craft still require disciplined engineering and consolidation.
Expect ROI scrutiny to rise as AI usage matures.
Many companies are currently in an exploration phase with loose spend controls, but Schoening expects uncomfortable ROI conversations soon—plus increased interest in smaller/self-hosted models if they’re “good enough.”
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesI think before it was very easy to always say, "Well, I will never be able to do this because insert skill issue." And I think we're realizing that even if you have the skills at your fingertips because now, I don't know, an AGI-adjacent model helps you, uh, the thing that matters is agency, and I don't think agency is very evenly distributed in the world.
— Max Schoening
One day you wake up and you realize the world is made up by people no smarter than you.
— Max Schoening
I think the first 10% of every project are now free.
— Max Schoening
If I really look at the, the truly great products, they all have one tiny core that is so exceptionally good.
— Max Schoening
We already have universal basic income. It's called knowledge work.
— Max Schoening
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