The Pulled-Up Ladder: Why Automating Mistakes will Kill Senior Talent
Early in my career, I sent a typo-filled email to a client. My head strategist noticed, CC’d the team, and called me out publicly.
My English wasn’t perfect, and my imposter syndrome was already heavy. In that moment, I felt like I didn’t belong in the industry. It was brutal, public friction.
If that happened today, an AI grammar assistant would have silently fixed my email before I hit send. It would have saved my pride. It would have protected the company’s image.
And I would have learned absolutely nothing.
Right now, the industry is making a catastrophic structural error. We are using AI to eradicate junior mistakes, without realizing that those mistakes are the exact mechanism that builds senior judgment.
Friction is the Training Ground
I learned how to design by making terrible fanzines. I learned UX research by going into the field and coming back with data that completely contradicted my project goals.
I learned by doing it wrong, feeling the friction of that failure, and being forced to correct it.
Today’s juniors are being robbed of that friction. The junior visualizer doesn’t get to copy a style poorly and develop their own taste through the struggle—Midjourney renders a polished, B+ image instantly. The junior copywriter doesn’t get to write a weak headline and watch a creative director tear it apart—ChatGPT outputs a perfectly safe, grammatically correct paragraph in two seconds.
AI produces a frictionless baseline before the struggle can even form. But expertise—true executive judgment, visual taste, and resilience—cannot be prompted. It has to be lived through.
The Hypocrisy of “AI Slop”
Look at LinkedIn today, and you will see senior directors with 20,000 followers ruthlessly mocking “AI slop.”
What they refuse to admit out loud is that their authority was built on human slop.
The typo emails. The rejected briefs. The UX reports with flawed conclusions. All of it—supervised, corrected, and repeated over years of having the room to be wrong. That is how they became senior.
They survived because the industry gave them a sandbox where failure was survivable. Today, those same leaders are using AI to automate the entry-level roles that used to be that sandbox.
They are protecting the ladder they climbed by pulling it up before the junior can reach the first rung.
The Final Moat
The entry-level brief that was too small to matter. The impossible client. The ugly, imperfect work you look back on with embarrassment.
That is not where careers go wrong. That is where they start.
The junior today is being told to race to learn AI tools so they can justify their existence on day one. We are demanding they prompt perfection before we have given them the room to develop the taste to recognize it.
If you are a founder or a creative leader, stop protecting your juniors from friction. Stop automating the tasks that build their judgment.
Because if you automate the training ground today, you will have absolutely no one with the taste to lead your company in five years.
Clarity is the most underrated business investment.
— Lokman S., Majalah BIKIN