CONCEPT
The Practice Taxonomy
Ericsson's three-mode classification — naive, purposeful, deliberate — distinguishing practice types by their developmental outcomes rather than the practitioner's intention, and locating most AI-assisted work at the naive end.
Not all practice is equal. The inequality is not a matter of degree but of kind, because two practitioners can spend identical hours in identical domains and arrive at radically different capability levels not through talent or motivation but through the structure of their engagement. Ericsson distinguished three modes of practice across his research program, each defined by the quality of interaction between practitioner and domain. The distinctions are empirically grounded, replicable across fields, and predict with uncomfortable accuracy which practitioners will continue improving over a career and which will plateau early and remain there indefinitely. The taxonomy matters now because AI-assisted work, in its default mode, resembles the least developmental of the three — and the gravitational pull of the default is strong enough that practitioners must deliberately override it to preserve the conditions for expertise.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Naive practice is the most common mode and the least developmental. It is repetition without targeting: the