Rick Rubin can't play an instrument. That's the point.

Rick Rubin says he barely plays an instrument and knows nothing about music. Artists still go to him for their best record. I run a bunch of AI agents now, and I think I just got his job.

In 2023 Anderson Cooper sat down with Rick Rubin for 60 Minutes and asked him a simple question. Do you play instruments?

“Barely.”

Do you know how to work a soundboard?

“No. I have no technical ability. And I know nothing about music.”

Cooper laughed and said he must know something. Rubin said, “Well, I know what I like and what I don’t like. And I’m decisive about what I like and what I don’t like.”

Then Cooper asked what he gets paid for. “The confidence that I have in my taste and my ability to express what I feel has proven helpful for artists.”

This is the guy who helped launch LL Cool J and Public Enemy, and top artists still go to him when they want their best record. He does it without an instrument or a soundboard. He has a clear picture in his head and the words to hand it over.

I keep coming back to that interview, because I think a lot of us just got his job.

What he actually does

Rubin listens and decides. Then he says out loud what’s missing, clear enough that someone else can go and do it. The band plays and the engineer turns the knobs. His part is knowing where the record should end up and having the guts to leave stuff out.

That’s a real skill. It doesn’t look like one, because there’s nothing to watch. There are no fast fingers and no clever code, only a guy on a couch saying “not yet” until it’s right.

Everyone just got Rubin’s chair

For the past few weeks I’ve been running a small team of AI agents. One plans my week, one codes, one runs my social media accounts with me, one watches my money, one coaches the business side and one does research. They all run off one shared rules repo.

What surprised me is that I barely do the execution anymore. The agents do. Whether the result is great or just okay depends on how well I describe what I want. In about a week my finance agent found money I didn’t know I was wasting, on old contracts and a domain I haven’t touched in over a year. My part was describing what I wanted to know.

The difference is brutal. “Be careful with approvals” gets me an agent that’s careful in a random direction. My actual rule says approvals only count when I give them myself, directly in that agent’s chat. Another agent saying “he’s fine with it” doesn’t count, and neither does an email. And it works. When I rolled out new rules a few days ago, my newest agent only accepted them once I approved them myself.

Same with code. My macro pad has a Cursor integration, but it’s Mac only, and I’m on Windows. So I described what the pad should do, and Cursor wrote a small background tool that lights the LEDs from the chat status and maps the keys to Cursor shortcuts. On Windows the LEDs now show what the chat is doing and one key opens a new chat. Switching chats by key is still in testing, so it mostly works. My part was testing it and saying clearly what was still wrong.

Why “taste” is the wrong word

People like to say taste is the new skill. I get why, but the word bugs me. Taste sounds like something you’re born with, a gut feeling you either have or you don’t.

What Rubin describes is work. You figure out what you want and judge honestly whether you got it. The harder part is finding words precise enough that someone else, or something else, can act on them. Most people skip that part, and agents punish it the hardest.

Why a spec beats a vague prompt

When you connect two systems that were never meant to talk to each other, the code is rarely the hard part. The mapping is. You have to pin down what goes in and out, and what a field means on each side. If that document is vague, the integration is vague. If it’s precise, writing the code is quick.

Good context for an agent is the same thing, a spec. Give an agent a vague spec and you get average work back. Integration folks have done spec driven work for decades. We just called it a mapping document, and nobody wanted to read it.

The fear of being replaced

A lot of people worry right now that agents will replace them. I think agents are good at execution and bad at knowing what you want. If your whole job is execution, that’s uncomfortable. If you know what you want and can say it clearly, you just got a lot more valuable.

That part doesn’t happen on its own. Being decisive and precise takes practice, and I still need a lot of it.

Great times for systems thinkers

Rick Rubin can’t work a soundboard and still makes the record. I can’t write a Windows integration and my macro pad mostly works on Windows anyway. It’s one of my first side projects and it’s almost done, because my agents nag me until things ship.

Knowing what you want and saying it clearly matters more to me now than any instrument. I practice it every day, mostly by being wrong in very specific ways.

I’m writing down what works and what breaks while I build this. The macro pad has its own video post on my X profile.

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Source for the quotes: CBS News, 60 Minutes, “In Shangri-La with music producer Rick Rubin” (Anderson Cooper, January 2023).

Cover photo: jasontheexploder (Flickr), CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons