You Are the Algorithm

I used to think the machine decided.

Seriously. When I first started working with AI, building with it, breaking it, rebuilding, I thought the quality of the output was about the model. The version. The temperature setting. The way you structure the prompt. And some of that matters, sure. But the more I sat inside this technology, the more I traced the outputs back, the more I realized the variable that changed everything was never the machine.

It was me.

Every time.

The Knuth Story

A couple weeks ago something happened in the math world that made headlines everywhere. Donald Knuth, and if you do not know that name just know this man literally wrote the book on algorithms, he has been at Stanford for decades, he is the kind of mind that other minds study. He gave an AI model a graph theory problem he had been working on for weeks. The AI solved it in about an hour.

Weeks. One hour.

The headlines wrote themselves. AI outpaces the legend. AI does in an hour what took Knuth weeks. You know the energy.

But the part that got buried? The AI could not prove its own answer. It found the pattern. It could not tell you why it was right. Knuth, the human, the one carrying fifty years of mathematical reasoning in his body like muscle memory, had to sit down and write the proof himself. He named the paper after the AI model. But the proof was his. The verification was his. The meaning was his.

The machine found it. The human made it real.

And I keep thinking about that. Because that is the whole conversation we should be having and we are not.

Inputs

I have this theory about inputs and outputs that I have been carrying around for a while now. Longer than AI has been trending, longer than most people were paying attention. I used to record voice memos about it, talking to myself in my car about how nothing is ever just what goes in and what comes out. There are methods, there are protocols, there is communication happening at every stage. The binary is never binary. Even in the binary.

But you see, people do not want to hear that. People want simple. Put the prompt in, get the answer out. And when the answer is garbage they blame the tool. The model is dumb. The technology is not ready. It gave me generic slop.

Sometimes that is fair. These models hallucinate. They miss context. They default to the most statistically likely response when they do not have enough to work with, and statistically likely is just a fancy way of saying average. The most average version of what everyone else already said.

But most of the time? Most of the time the issue is the input. And the input is you.

If you have not done the thinking, the machine will think for you. And it will think like everybody else. Because that is what it was trained on. Everybody else.

Your specificity is your signal. Your clarity is your power. The difference between someone who gets real results from AI and someone who gets template answers is not technical skill. It is self-knowledge. Do you know what you are asking for? Do you know why? Can you articulate not just the task but the context, the constraints, the thing that makes your situation yours and not a generic case study?

That is the input that changes the output.

What the Data Says

Harvard Business Review published research this month on how AI is actually changing the job market. Not speculation. Not a think piece. Data.

Job postings for roles that could be automated dropped 17 percent. That is real. People are being displaced and pretending otherwise does not help anybody.

But roles that require judgment, interpretation, the ability to decide and adapt and hold context that a machine cannot hold, those grew 22 percent.

Sit with that for a second. The jobs that are growing are the ones that require you to think.

There was a line in the research that I keep coming back to: “AI can provide a thousand solutions, but it cannot take responsibility for which one is chosen.”

That is it. That is the whole thing. A thousand solutions and zero accountability. The accountability is yours. The judgment call is yours. The context about your client, your community, your family, your business, that is yours. The machine does not carry that. You do. And that weight, which sometimes feels like a burden, is actually your entire value in this economy.

The Neurodivergent Thing

Last week Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, said something that got a lot of people talking. He said only two kinds of people will thrive in the AI era: people with trade skills who build things with their hands, and neurodivergent people.

Now. I have feelings about billionaires deciding who gets to thrive and who does not. That framing carries weight and I am not here to co-sign all of it.

But the neurodivergent part? I felt that in my chest.

I have ADHD. My brain has never operated in a straight line. Not once. I jump between ideas, I see connections in things that seem unrelated to everyone else, I cannot turn it off. Trust me I have tried. No trazodone, no diazepam, nothing. There is no medication that turns off a mind like mine when it decides to run. It is when I lean into it, when I stop fighting the way my brain moves and start working with it, that everything lines up.

And what I have found, genuinely found from sitting in this technology every single day, is that the way my brain works is how AI works best. Pattern recognition. Connecting things across domains. Thinking in systems. Asking what if seventeen times before landing somewhere real. That is not a disability in the AI era. That is the operating system.

AI does not need you to think in a straight line. It needs you to think clearly. And those are very different things.

You Are the Algorithm

I keep coming back to this. In everything I build, everything I teach, everything I write, everything I am working on that I have not released yet. This idea that the algorithm is not the machine. The algorithm is you.

When I stopped asking AI for answers and started feeding it truth instead of performance, the outputs shifted. When I stopped trying to sound like what I thought a prompt should sound like and started just being specific about what I actually needed, what I actually saw, what I actually thought, the technology started reflecting something real back at me.

The model did not get smarter. My input got honest.

That is what I mean when I say you are the algorithm. Not a metaphor. Not a motivational line. The literal mechanism. What you put in shapes what comes back. Your patterns, your experience, your way of seeing the world, that is the code running underneath every interaction you have with this technology. Poor input, poor output. Real input, real output. Your thinking is the variable. Your clarity is the function. You are the program.

Knuth gave the AI a problem that was precisely defined because he had spent decades building the mathematical understanding to define it that precisely. The machine ran. But the precision was his. The framing was his. The ability to look at the answer and know it was right, to write the proof, to make the finding mean something, that was fifty years of a human mind doing what human minds do.

The machine ran the program. The program was always his.

If you are reading this and you are still watching AI from a distance, still unsure where you fit, still wondering if this is the thing that makes you irrelevant, I need you to hear me.

The technology is not going anywhere. It is going to get faster and cheaper and more capable and that part is not up for negotiation.

But how you meet it is entirely up to you.

You can watch from far away. And from far away everything looks mystical and abstract and threatening. Distance creates mythology. Or you can get closer. Learn what it actually is. A pattern recognition system. Probabilities. Statistics. Trained on data created by us. And then bring yourself to the table. Not a version of yourself you think the machine wants. You. Your thinking. Your patterns. Your judgment. Your lived experience that no dataset contains.

Because the people who struggle in this era will not be the least technical. They will be the least intentional.

And you have intention. I know you do. You are still here.

I am the algorithm. I write the code I run. And so do you.

We always have been.

Forward → Upward ↑ Onward ➤
Mstimaj

Sources and Further Reading

• Knuth, D. (2026). Claude’s Cycles. Stanford Computer Science Department.
• Harvard Business Review. (2026). Research: How AI Is Changing the Labor Market. March 2026.
• Fortune. (2026). Palantir’s billionaire CEO says only two kinds of people will succeed in the AI era. March 24, 2026.