𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐑𝐞𝐝 𝐐𝐮𝐞𝐞𝐧’𝐬 𝐑𝐚𝐜𝐞: 𝐖𝐡𝐲 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐀𝐈 𝐒𝐤𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐬 𝐀𝐫𝐞 𝐀𝐥𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐲 𝐄𝐱𝐩𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐝 You’re running hard just to stay in place. That’s the Red Queen Effect. And if you work with AI, you’re in it right now. Every week brings new models. New tools. New capabilities that make last month’s “cutting edge” feel antique. I spent weeks mastering n8n automation workflows. Learned how to stitch together complex logic. Built real systems. Then they released an AI chatbot that builds most of those workflows for you. My hard-earned skill got compressed into a conversation. The Christmas Morning Problem It feels like Christmas morning on repeat. New Claude models. GPT updates. Gemini improvements. Wrapper companies racing to ship features. Daily gifts sound great. Until you realize last week’s gift is already in the closet. Take Claude Skills. Most people ignore them because they sound incremental. Just another feature. They’re not. I’ve built several. They quietly eat SaaS products for breakfast. The Claude in Excel app alone is ridiculous. Closing journal entries. Underwriting models. Complex financial analysis that used to take a junior analyst days. Is it perfect? No. You still go back and forth. But the time compression is undeniable. Prompting used to be the skill. Now the skill is teaching AI to prompt itself. Context engineering. Feeding it the right inputs so it asks better questions than you would. That idea won’t change next week. How you execute it will. YouTube is still the best free AI education platform. And the AI itself might be the best teacher. I’ve learned more by asking Claude to break down concepts than from half the paid courses I’ve seen. The Accelerating Treadmill This pace isn’t slowing down. It’s accelerating. Which leaves two paths: You stay curious. Accept that today’s mastery becomes tomorrow’s baseline. Treat this like a game where the rules change mid-match. Or you lock in on what you know. Build walls around your current skills. Watch them depreciate faster than a new car off the lot. The Red Queen told Alice she had to run as fast as she could just to stay where she was. To get anywhere else, she had to run twice as fast. That’s the race we’re in. We’re the first generation to experience real-time skill obsolescence. Knowledge with the shelf life of fresh produce. What AI skill did you learn recently that’s already been automated?