Should I Become a Plumber?

The pros are obvious: cute blue dungarees. I assume at some point you get handed a wrench, and I’d formally transition into a Mario sister.

The cons are also obvious: spiders. In all the cupboards, attics and dark corners that plumbers seem to spend time in.

This thought spiral is courtesy of listening to a Diary of a CEO podcast about the future with AI.

Some episodes should come with a trigger warning for people who have a tendency for an existential crisis. There’s some feedback for you, Steven Bartlett.

I’m known for falling down rabbit holes. So when this AI doom feeling raises its head, I know I can either consume more theoretical content about the future. Or I can build.

Interestingly, everyone keeps naming ‘judgment’ as one of the things humans will be kept around for in a post-AI-taking-over world. AI lacks true judgment because it relies entirely on observational pattern-matching and probabilities, rather than lived, contextual experience. So my theory is: oversteer on doing… and optimise for lived experience - aka - build things, break things, fix things, and experience them through doing.

For me, that shift away from distance into doing has taken a very specific form. Building my Family OS inside Claude.

It’s become my operating environment for understanding what actually happens when humans and AI work together in real life. I’ve learned how systems break. How messy context really is. How quickly good ideas fall apart without maintenance. And what it actually takes to keep something useful alive when reality keeps changing underneath it.

It’s a complex learning ground with real-life use cases I can play with without anyone really watching (except you 🙂 ).

I built:

… and a dozen or more solutions to my everyday chaos.

The thing is, my overexcited building phase created lots of tools, not one system, and what felt like progress, over time, was actually becoming fragmentation.

The mess doesn’t announce itself when you’re building. It just becomes harder to work with. You start asking questions like: where does the source of truth actually live? How do you improve X output, which is slightly off?

This issue shows up pretty quickly in family life, where in one week: school trips get cancelled, kids get sick, the neighbour can’t do pick-up tomorrow after all, someone suddenly has to fly to a different city for work, and Alfie now only likes salami in his packed lunch, even though he was “definitely allergic to it” last week.

And while family life has always been chaotic, we’re increasingly seeing the same thing happen at work. More change. More moving parts. More context shifting underneath us.

So, although being able to build tools/skills/agents to solve problems is a skill we inevitably all need, learning how to maintain truth and keep an overall system manageable is the next step up. Because truth is what determines whether anything you build is actually useful. And managabiity means you’ll actually be able to keep it up to date and tweak it.

It sounds abstract, but it’s simply knowing what information matters, where it lives, and how you structure it so it stays useful as reality changes around it.

I stopped organising by area of life and bolting on new parts, and started organising by the job each skill was actually doing - researching, detecting, digesting, planning etc. Most of them, it turned out, were doing the same handful of jobs - just across many different contexts.

I stopped expanding the system with my latest idea, and started focusing on making it coherent - smaller, simpler and easier to hold in my head. Fewer skills. Fewer places for truth to drift. And far less chance of things quietly going out of date.

I’ll share more on the skill patterns and how this works next week, including the one that quietly became my favourite, so you can build it too.

In the meantime, I’d highly recommend making a mess. You’ll learn a lot - just ask your kids!

Sarah xx

P.S. If my LinkedIn job title changes to “Plumber”, send help. I’m probably stuck in a cupboard with spiders… listening to a podcast 🕷️