I don't know what I know.

Someone told the Mrs and I that we are not normal. That we do not use AI like normal people do. I have been turning that over ever since.

I am not sure what to do with it. It did not land as a compliment exactly. More like an observation from someone standing outside the bubble looking in, trying to find a word for something she could not quite name.

The thing is - I do not have a frame for what I know either.

Most knowledge has an address. The average stair pitch in the US is 32.47 degrees. My first job doing CAD work had me designing steel and aluminium stair systems for government contracts - and that fact has stuck with me ever since. I can trace it back. I know where it came from, how it got in, why it stayed. That number is fact-shaped. It lands like a fact.

What I know about AI does not land like that. I cannot cite it. I cannot point to where I learned it or trace the path it took to become instinct. I just reach for it and it is there.

I learned CAD in 93-94. Started using it professionally in 95-96. CAD and four other suites are completely effortless now - but that took thirty years. I have been using AI seriously for maybe six months and it feels the same. I genuinely cannot square that circle.

I did a couple of Anthropic certifications somewhere along the way. Mostly just to do them. They did not teach me much I did not already know. Which should have been reassuring and somehow made it worse. If the cert is just confirming what you already figured out on your own, what exactly is the credential certifying.

So when someone says you are not normal - the imposter in your head does not hear a compliment. It hears a question. Are you actually good at this or have you just been lucky enough to spend six months going fast in the right direction.

Here is where I land though.

The built environment runs on knowledge that cannot be cited. Thirty years of site experience does not live in a manual. A detail looks wrong before you can explain why. A contractor gets called back not because of anything written down but because of something earned. That intuition is not lesser knowledge. It is knowledge that has been used enough to stop announcing itself.

Maybe AI just embeds the same way. Fast, intuitive, hard to cite. Not because it is shallow but because that is what happens when you actually use something instead of studying it.

The Mrs's EMBA cohort called us not normal. I think she was just watching intuition from the outside and not having a word for it.

I still do not have a frame for what I know. But I am less worried about that than I was.