Systematic Intuition
In AI, capability is no longer the bottleneck. The new skill is knowing which parts of the system require understanding—and which no longer require your gaze.
Published Sep 23, 2026
We used to talk about “Google Juice”: the accumulated instinct for finding things on Google. We need a new version of that idea for working with AI.
I’ve been calling it systematic intuition.
My friend Alice Hu works with astrology and spiritual guidance. She talks about intuition as a way of understanding. Not perfect knowledge, but a practiced sense.
Something similar is emerging in software.
The biggest limitation in AI is not capability. It’s our ability to understand.
In conventional software development, expertise meant understanding exactly how the system worked. AI-enabled systems are often impossible to understand entirely. More importantly, trying to do so can be a poor use of your attention.
You read that correctly… understanding the entire system may be a poor use of your time.
You need to understand the shape of things and which things require detail. That changes with the problem and solution space.
Enter systematic intuition.
An AI system is more like an organism. You cannot control every internal movement directly. You influence its behavior. Rarely can you write a hard rule that produces exactly the same behavior every time.
Systematic intuition is the practiced judgment of knowing which parts influence the system and which parts no longer require your gaze.
