We’ve all had that moment recently. You’re staring at a screen, watching an AI instantly generate a block of code, write a complex SQL query, or draft a perfect technical document. And in the back of your mind, a tiny voice asks: “Is it over for me?”

It’s a fair question. AI is moving fast, and it’s slowly eating up the repetitive tasks we used to consider “our job.” But here is the thing: I don’t think we are obsolete. In fact, I think we have an edge, and it comes down to a specific, uniquely human trait.

I call it figure-out-ability.

What is Figure-Out-Ability?

Figure-out-ability isn’t a technical skill you can list on a resume, like C#, Node.js, or PostgreSQL. It is the grit, the intuition, and the sheer stubbornness required to look at a messy, poorly defined problem and say, “I don’t know how to do this yet, but I will figure it out.”

It is the gap between a perfectly prompted AI output and a working system in the real world.

Think about your day-to-day work. How often is your job just writing code? Almost never. Your job is usually dealing with ambiguous requirements, wrestling with legacy systems, and trying to understand why a deployment failed only in the staging environment.

AI is incredible at answering questions. But it needs you to know which questions to ask. It needs you to understand the context, the business logic, and the weird quirks of your specific architecture.

Why It Keeps Us Relevant

If your only value as an engineer is writing boilerplate code or simple CRUD operations, yes, you should be worried. AI can do that faster and cheaper.

But if you possess figure-out-ability, you become the orchestrator. You survive—and thrive—because you are no longer just a code-monkey; you are a problem solver.

Here is why this skill is our ultimate defense:

• Context is King: AI operates in a vacuum. It doesn’t know that the marketing team is going to change their minds tomorrow, or that your database struggles under specific types of loads. You have the context to figure out the right solution, not just the technically correct one.
• Connecting the Dots: Figure-out-ability means knowing how to stitch things together. It’s taking an AI-generated script, modifying it to fit your vertical slice architecture, deploying it via Azure, and setting up the telemetry to monitor it. AI gives you the pieces; you build the puzzle.
• Adaptability: Technology changes, but the ability to learn doesn’t. If you can figure out how to integrate an obscure API today, you can figure out whatever new tool replaces it tomorrow.

Cultivating the Skill

The best part about figure-out-ability is that you can actively train it.

Stop asking for the exact answer immediately. When you hit a roadblock, don’t just dump the error message into an AI prompt right away. Read the stack trace. Check the documentation. Form a hypothesis about why it’s broken. Use AI as a sounding board, not a crutch.

Embrace the messy, ambiguous projects. Volunteer for the tasks where no one quite knows where to start. That friction—that uncomfortable feeling of not knowing what you are doing—is the exact feeling of your figure-out-ability growing.

AI is an incredibly powerful tool, and we absolutely need to learn how to use it. But tools don’t build houses; builders do. As long as you maintain your ability to adapt, to hack things together, and to figure it out, you will always be relevant.

Keep building. Keep figuring it out.