Sun Tzu on AI: Position, Don't Fight

Sun Tzu wrote about war, but he was really writing about uncertainty. How to win through positioning when you can’t predict outcomes. How to stay clear-eyed when everyone around you is reacting on instinct.

That feels relevant right now.

Know Yourself and the Enemy

The enemy here isn’t AI. It’s displacement. Irrelevance. Getting caught unprepared while you were busy arguing about whether the threat was real.

Sun Tzu’s first principle was understanding both sides clearly. See things as they are, not as you wish they were.

Applied to AI, that means two honest assessments. First: what can AI actually do today? The real capabilities and the real limitations, not the hype and not the demos. Most people get this wrong in both directions. They overestimate what AI can do this year and underestimate what it’ll do in five.

Second: what do you actually bring? What parts of your work are genuinely hard to automate? What’s already commoditized and you just haven’t admitted it yet?

I’ve been asking myself this about my own work. Some of what I do, the pattern recognition, architecting systems, scraping and gathering complex data and ETL, AI is already closing the gap. Other parts, the judgment calls in ambiguous situations, the relationships built over years, the accountability when things go wrong, those feel more durable.

But I’m not certain. And I think certainty is the wrong posture right now.

Win Without Fighting

Sun Tzu’s most famous idea: the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

Resistance to AI is a losing strategy. You don’t beat it on speed. You don’t beat it on memory. You don’t beat it on scale. Fighting on those terms is choosing to lose.

The better move is to position yourself where the fight doesn’t happen. Where AI augments what you do instead of replacing it.

I think about operators I’ve worked with in fintech and stablecoins. One team I advised last year automated their transaction monitoring entirely. The AI flagged anomalies, generated reports, handled the volume they never could manually. But when it came to deciding whether to halt a payment corridor during a compliance gray zone, they kept that with a human. The cost of a wrong call was too high. The context was too specific. The accountability couldn’t be delegated.

That’s the split. They let AI handle the throughput. They kept the judgment.

The person who uses AI well beats the person who fights it. Every time.

Terrain Is Everything

Sun Tzu was obsessed with terrain. High ground. Choke points. Exposed plains. He knew that where you fight matters more than how hard you fight.

Some work sits on high ground. Strategic decision-making. Creative direction. Roles that require physical presence, deep trust, or real accountability. These are defensible positions.

Other work is flatland. Routine knowledge work. First drafts. Pattern matching. Anything that looks like “process inputs, produce outputs.” AI is flooding these plains right now. If that’s where you’re standing, the water is rising.

The data confirms this. Stack Overflow’s 2025 survey found 84% of developers now use or plan to use AI tools, up from 76% last year. But here’s the tension: 46% don’t trust the accuracy of AI output, up from 31% the year before. Adoption is rising. Trust is falling. Everyone’s using the tools. Nobody fully believes them yet.

This isn’t about certain jobs being safe forever. It’s about recognizing that terrain shifts. What’s high ground today might be flatland in three years. You have to keep moving.

Speed and Preparation

Act while others deliberate. That’s Sun Tzu.

Repositioning is still possible. AI fluency. New skill combinations. Understanding the tools deeply enough to know where they’re headed. This window won’t stay open forever. The people moving now will have leverage the late movers won’t.

But Sun Tzu also warned against recklessness. Speed without preparation is just panic. I’ve seen people throw themselves at AI tools without understanding them, betting careers and businesses on capabilities they misread. That’s not strategy. That’s gambling.

Learn the tools. Understand the limits. Then move fast.

Fluid, Not Fixed

Your job title is a temporary position. Your current skill set is a snapshot, not an identity.

The people who struggle most with AI aren’t the ones who lack talent. They’re the ones who’ve fused their sense of self to a specific way of working. When that way becomes obsolete, they experience it as an existential threat rather than a strategic pivot.

I’ve had to let go of expertise before. I spent years deep in blockchain infrastructure, a market I was confident would matter. When the market shifted, those specific patterns I’d mastered weren’t the point anymore. It’s disorienting. But holding on tighter doesn’t help. It just means you go down with the position.

What Now?

Most people are asking: how do I survive AI?

That’s the wrong question. It puts you on defense. It frames AI as something to endure rather than something to navigate.

Sun Tzu would ask a different question: what becomes more valuable in a world where AI handles the routine?

That reframe changes everything.

When the routine is automated, the non-routine becomes scarce. Judgment. Trust. Accountability. The ability to operate in ambiguity. The willingness to be wrong and own it.

These aren’t skills you learn in a weekend. They’re built over years. Which means the time to start building is now.

Still Figuring It Out

I don’t have this figured out. I’m not writing this from the other side of some transformation. I’m in the middle of it, same as everyone else.

But I find Sun Tzu useful because he was writing about uncertainty. About situations where you can’t control outcomes, only your positioning. About winning through clarity rather than force.

That feels right for this moment.

AI is advancing whether we’re ready or not. The question is whether we meet it with strategy or just reaction.

What terrain are you standing on, and is the water rising?