Why Soft Skills Matter More Than Ever

I recently built my own Learning Management System (LMS). Took me a week.

I'm not joking. These are facts.

It's not my first rodeo but still. That's fast.

For many years my academy site ran on Teachable. That relationship started out great. Solid product, very keen pricing. But, over the years Teachable made a habit of making changes to plans and pricing that were totally in their favour. I really didn't have much choice but to grumble and pay up. Recently, with no warning, they offered to approximately double my annual fees for no extra benefit to me. That had a final straw feeling to it.

After surveying the field I realised there wasn't a solid alternative so it was stick with Teachable or, sharp intake of breath, build my own.

Yes, this has a lot to do with AI and LLMs 😂.

I've had quite a bit of success with AI tools including building Memphemera my iOS app for your 'mental ephemera' and I've got fairly handy at directing them. After a couple of years I pretty much know how they think, what they do well, what they do badly and consequently how to get the best from them.

So I posed a question to Claude.

"Do you reckon we can build an LMS in a weekend using Next.js? No need for payment integration and I'm fine with some manual work to upload and connect up course videos but it needs to provide as solid a user experience as a commercial product."

Now, before I relay what Claude said, consider if I had asked a different question.

"Map out a plan with timelines to create a functioning LMS using Next.js. No need for payment integration and I'm fine with some manual work to upload and connect up course videos but it needs to provide as solid a user experience as a commercial product."

The answer to that second question would be a plan taking probably 1-3 months with a week at the start just faffing about defining requirements and so on.

That would certainly have been enough to put me off.

LLMs can be easily provoked to lean in the direction you want. Not that this changes reality but still...

Asked the first question, can we do it in a weekend, the answer was along the lines of we can get pretty far, maybe might need a few more days, what an exciting project - probably actually not much to it.

Ok, then it sounds like we've got ourselves a fair fight.

In reality of course Claude has no idea. Not really. It knows a lot about what other people think is possible and it can make good guesses but those guesses will err on the side of mass opinion, which in this case is months because, well, that's how long stuff like this takes.

Isn't it?

No-one except someone who does not know what he does not know would think you could do this in a weekend. But, based on my history of building stuff with AI as an accelerant and knowing how much there is to an LMS I figured it just might be possible.

So now Claude is primed. The timeline is aggressive but this lunatic human wants to know can it be done so I'll just say yes because it probably can.

A weekend did turn out to be too aggressive but a week was enough. A lot of that was the manual labour of adding and wiring up the videos and other course material while ensuring that process was friendly enough to add future courses. Another good chunk was making sure the tiny bit of user data I can't avoid holding is properly secured.

It's been happily supporting my learners now for a couple of months.

And the best part? The totally monthly cost is roughly 1 dollar or approximately 1% of the Teachable subscription. Over a few years that saving is going to add up. Plus, I have maximum flexibility now so the site is better looking and it's fast.

So that's the story. Why relay it here?

I am not a trained developer. I have never properly learned a programming language and until a couple of years ago I hadn't coded for about 25 years. In all honesty if you left me alone in a room with a text editor and no access to an LLM I'd struggle to put up a simple index.html.

But I do have a particular set of skills. Soft skills. Skills the LLM does not have.

I can envision the end result and I can break it down into logic steps and clearly articulate what needs to be done at each step. This means I have a degree of at least two of the skills I referenced in CS Skills In The AI Age:

I don't just dumbly take the output from an LLM. Ever really - I learned that lesson the hard way. Everything is reviewed, code versions are compared, the logic is examined. (You're thinking but wait he said he can't code. And it's true, not from a blank sheet of paper but I sure can read code, evaluate it, debug it, iterate on it and improve it. Don't ask me how that works - it just seeped in by osmosis).

That means I have some degree of a third skill: critical thinking.

Working with an LLM you can get into a kind of flow state, I believe the kids call it 'vibe coding', where you are carried along by the sheer rate of your progress. Can be very dangerous - things get loose. To avoid it you need to spot yourself falling into the pattern.

This requires some degree of two more skills:

Now and then you'll fall into a hole when you're coding with an LLM and you are, like me, a bit of a non-coder. This is where the actual coders still have a huge advantage: they'll avoid the LLM induced holes where it blows a fuse and starts recommending solutions that are way too overblown. Mallets to crack peanuts. You have to be on your guard with these and if they get through your defences it can be a frustrating, time consuming mess. And it'll happen. So, you need another of our soft skills: resilience.

And finally one more soft skill: time management. As I've just mentioned there's a kind of a flow state to using an LLM - a productivity boosting way of working where I'm pretty sure days of normal work for a decent coder get done in hours. But it's mentally demanding - you have to avoid all the pitfalls we've just talked through and keep your prompts clear and crisp. You have to make sure to properly order your activities. So taking breaks to refresh yourself, aligning core tasks with your high energy parts of the day and minimising distraction are all important.

Let's sum this up. Soft skills to get the best from an LLM:

The greater the degree of these skills you possess the greater your ability is going to be to thrive in the AI Age.

Is it worth it? Should you focus on developing these skills? Maybe you don't code. Maybe you never will.

(Leaving aside for one moment that the huge general utility of developing these skills in the modern workplace is enough justification).

Coding is the tip of the iceberg here.

Just substitute whatever your work is for 'coding' in this article and it applies just the same.

If your job requires you to sit in front of a screen, or you work in an office, you can go faster with AI starting today.

Next week? Faster.

Next month? Faster still.

And if you don't? Well, you can be sure some of the people around you will.

Those people will leave you behind.

This post was reviewed by Claude for spelling and grammar.

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