Which of Your Work Is Actually Verifiable?

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR: Two well-argued pieces already say the same thing about the AI era: AI takes over the work that is cheap to verify, and human value moves to the expensive verification that is left. Jason Wei calls it the verifier’s rule; Christian Catalini calls it the Measurability Gap. Neither of them models what happens when you misjudge how verifiable a task is. A lecture by Zeynep Tufekci made me doubt that I can reliably tell. So this post adds one thing on top of their work and applies it to my own craft: the risk for a Solutions Architect is not that our verifiable work gets automated, but that we routinely misjudge which of our work is verifiable in the first place. I sort real SA artifacts by how expensive they are to check, and the sort is not the one instinct hands you.

I spent part of an internal conference recently listening to a talk about the future of my own job. One of the talks pointed at a public lecture by the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, and that pointer sent me to the full ninety-one minutes [1]. I went in expecting an argument about whether AI takes the Solutions Architect job. I came out with a sharper and more uncomfortable question, which is the one I want to hand you.

schristoph.online

Which of Your Work Is Actually Verifiable?