The shoemaker's children now go barefoot by choice

Someone asked me whether the old saying — the shoemaker's children go barefoot — still holds in the age of artificial intelligence. I think it does, but not because AI solved the problem. It changed the cost of solving it, and by changing the cost it also changed what the saying reveals about the person it describes.

The saying exists because there used to be a very clear barrier. The shoemaker spent the day making shoes for customers. He got home exhausted. Making one more pair required time, effort and manual work. The result: barefoot children. The explanation was honest, almost generous — the professional was not negligent, just human.

The barrier that fell

In many knowledge professions, that barrier has all but disappeared.

The developer who never built their own website now ships one over a weekend. The designer who never organized a portfolio asks AI for the initial structure. The lawyer who never wrote content publishes articles weekly. The manager who never documented processes generates documentation in minutes.

"I don't have time" lost most of its force. And without it, going barefoot lost its alibi.

The new bottleneck

AI drastically reduced the cost of writing, coding, designing, editing video, building presentations, researching and documenting. Those are all execution activities — and execution was exactly where most personal projects used to die.

What it did not reduce is the cost of deciding, prioritizing, staying consistent, publishing continuously and building a reputation.

The technical part got cheap. The discipline is still expensive.

That is why you can find thousands of people saying they want to create content, write a book or launch a SaaS, and a far smaller fraction who actually published anything. The distance between intention and result stopped being technical.

What the saying means now

The shift is subtle, but it changes the whole reading.

The implicit sentence used to be: I know how to do it, but it takes too much work. Today it became: I know how to do it, AI does eighty percent of the work... and I still didn't do it.

Maybe the new version is something like "the shoemaker's children go barefoot because nobody asked the AI for a pair." Or, more uncomfortably: in the age of AI, bare feet stopped revealing a lack of skill and started revealing a lack of priority.

From execution to orchestration

This connects to something I keep seeing in the market: competitive advantage is migrating from execution to orchestration.

Ten years ago, knowing how to build was the advantage. Today AI democratizes a good part of that building. The differentiator becomes choosing what to build, in what order, for whom and why. Execution still matters — it just stopped being the main constraint in many knowledge activities.

None of which makes bare feet indefensible. Priority is a finite resource, and deliberately choosing not to build your own website is a legitimate call. What changed is that it is now a decision rather than a consequence.